code just sits there; data actually goes somewhere, and that journey is the program.
means the path information takes as it moves through a system, getting read, transformed, and passed along between functions, threads, or machines.
from formalized in computer science through dataflow diagrams and dataflow programming in the 1960s-70s, when engineers realized tracing where values travel matters as much as tracing what instructions execute.
apache kafka — streams billions of events daily between services at linkedin, netflix, uber
tensorflow — named literally for tensors flowing through a computation graph
unix pipes — 1973 invention letting output of one program become input of another
excel formulas — cell dependencies recalculate automatically when upstream data changes