I have two questions. First, what exactly is Flow-Based Programming? Emphasis on exactly. I know what dataflow is and I know who J. Paul Morrison is and I've even browsed through his book. I still can't figure it out, and the book (at least the parts I looked at) had too many diagrams and not enough code to clarify this most basic of questions. Every discussion on it seems hopelessly hand-wavey. What I want is the diffs between FBP and other computational models. Just the diffs, please! Or is it just dataflow? In that case, which version of dataflow? There have been many.
Second, we know from the history of these things that it's easy to sell managers and journalists on boxes-and-lines visual programming. The pictures look a lot easier to understand than reams of source code do, but that's always because the examples are trivial—invariably some variant of a box with 2 in it, another box with two in it, arrows leading from those to a box with + in it, and then an arrow leading to a box with 4 in it. These always turn out to be a siren song because they don't scale to application complexity. How exactly is FBP different? Emphasis on exactly.
The crude/simple explanation I think is to imagine your program like an Excel spreadsheet: Some cells on the spreadsheet contain your client-side data (i.e. your "model"). Other cells are used by a javascript library to decide what's in the DOM (i.e. your "view")
The "flow-based programming" model involves creating all the formulas that shuffle the data from the model to the view.
At least that's what I can gather from what I've read (and I agree it's always been a big fail in the past, though there may be some merit to this idea eventually in limited roles.)
Second, we know from the history of these things that it's easy to sell managers and journalists on boxes-and-lines visual programming. The pictures look a lot easier to understand than reams of source code do, but that's always because the examples are trivial—invariably some variant of a box with 2 in it, another box with two in it, arrows leading from those to a box with + in it, and then an arrow leading to a box with 4 in it. These always turn out to be a siren song because they don't scale to application complexity. How exactly is FBP different? Emphasis on exactly.