In CS literature, this programming model is called "stream computing." I work on System S, which is the research name of IBM's InfoSphere Streams, which is a d

In CS literature, this programming model is called "stream computing." I work on System S, which is the research name of IBM's InfoSphere Streams, which is a distributed, realtime (edit: soft realtime; so, high throughput, low latency, but not hard realtime with guaranteed deadlines) streaming system with an associated language. Another project in this area is Storm. See this comment thread for more on that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3193115 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3193115 But, Anic seems to be more related to the kind of streaming languages that came from the digital signal processing and embedded worlds. See, for example, the StreamIt project: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/streamit/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/streamit/ In particular, a StreamIt tutorial: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/streamit/papers/streamit-cookbook.pdf http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/streamit/papers/streamit-coo... Note that Streams, Storm, Anic, StreamIt all have the same underlying programming model, but Streams and Storm target a different area than Anic and StreamIt. Streams and Storm target the emerging area of "big data" where you need to distribute your computation across a cluster. Anic and StreamIt are lower level: applications such as video decoding are streaming in nature, but one typically implements them on a single chip, and often even in hardware. Standard disclaimer: my views are not official IBM views.