Non-Inspirations
There are a number of things that you might suspect were part of my set of inspirations for creating 'flow', or maybe you think I even copied the idea from them, but that in fact (you'll have to trust me on this one) is not true.
I didn't study Computer Science, and if I had I may well have been exposed to some of these subjects a long-time ago. That would probably have saved me a lot of time.
But, then I would have been implementing someone else's ideas and not (what I thought were) my own. Think of all the satisfaction I would have lost out on while re-inventing thirty to forty year-old ideas!
While implementing the first steps of 'flow' I started to see some materials come up in my Internet searches, that looked like they could be part of a theory of the things I was struggling with. The Main one would be Hoare's 1976 paper on the "Theory of Communicating Sequential Processes" (or CSP for short).
It turns out some of that based work was the basis for some of my inspirations (e.g. Inmos Transputer and Occam language), unbeknownst to me.
But I decided to deliberately ignore them as I worked out my first thoughts, did the initial implementation and got some simple examples up and running!
Later, I looped back and read some papers, and confirmed most of my conjectures.
I got a bit bored with the algebra approach to it (and related papers) though and didn't read or learn too much.
One Hoare paper refers more to a practical implementation, and does hit on a number of the very subjects I was struggling with, such as the buffering (or not) of data on "data flows" between functions (or processes in his terms).
Once I progress some more, I will probably go back and read more of these papers and books and find solutions to the problems I have struggled to work out on my own - but part of the purpose of this project for me is the intellectual challenge to work them out for myself, as best as I can.