Okay, yeah, so I agree with most of the criticisms here. Flow-based languages didn't catch on because no-one came up with a really compelling general-purpose im

Okay, yeah, so I agree with most of the criticisms here. Flow-based languages didn't catch on because no-one came up with a really compelling general-purpose implementation that scales up to large, complex projects. It's not because it was actively suppressed by the programmer Illuminati to keep our salaries high. I think the main reason FBP hasn't gone mainstream is because most implementations are built around a graphical programming environments (e.g. LabView, Pure Data, Scratch) in order to cater to non-programmers. But programmers love their text files, and for plenty of good reasons. Code represented as text can be edited by any general-purpose text editor, work well with version control systems, and can (usually) be easily split into separate files. It's probably instructive, then, to look at a domain in which textual flow-based programming languages have become mainstream. I'm speaking, of course, about Hardware Description Languages, which are used by digital circuit designers to simulate and prototype complex circuits, like CPUs. The two dominant HDLs are VHDL and Verilog. Both of these languages use a flow-based model, in which logical blocks called entities are connected to each other through input and output ports. The reason these languages work is because the domain is a good fit for FBP and because they are designed for the domain experts (circuit designers) to use, and not for some non-technical manager to be able to understand. Taking a similar approach to web programming may work. Logical blocks connected through ports. Except instead of ones and zeroes going through these ports, you have I/O events and data. I haven't looked at NoFlo, but it might be interesting. Note that I'm not saying that VHDL and Verilog are good languages, even for their intended domain. They have plenty of warts, and a FBP language for software that basically copies one or the other would be terrible (especially VHDL; oh god, please nobody make VHDL for web programming). But the entity-port model is essentially sound, and I would be quite interested in a general-purpose language that adapts that model in a well thought-out way.