Programming with Implicit Flows

Modern software differs significantly from traditional computer applications that mostly process reasonably small amounts of static input data-sets in batch mode. Modern software increasingly processes massive amounts of data, whereby it is also often the case that new input data is produced and/or existing data is modified on the fly. Consequently, programming models that facilitate the development of such software are emerging. What characterizes them is that data, respectively changes thereof, implicitly flow through computation modules. The software engineer declaratively defines computations as compositions of other computations without explicitly modeling how data should flow along dependency relations between data producer and data consumer modules, letting the runtime to automatically manage and optimize data flows. © 2014 IEEE.