Most data flow programming environments cannot represent lambdas, and this is why the graphs always end up turning into spaghetti: you don't actually have tools to reduce repetition in the graph's structure, using the graph itself.They are successful in artist and music contexts because the graphs tend to be simple pipelines at heart. Having dealt with sufficiently complex grasshopper graphs, I disagree that it's good at arbitrary list processing, certainly compared to ordinary list operators and iterators in code.My conclusion is that a dataflow environment that does allow for lambdas and proper n-way forking would necessarily have to be an effect system in the FP sense. It's a data flow graph that computes its own continuation and which has no fixed or preset topology. It can rewire itself based on the data flowing through it.

With computer interfaces, you hardly ever interact with something in an immediate way. I want a comment to appear on this site but instead I am writing this text in a white box and not where the comment would appear. All the computer interactions are mediated by these in-between steps. (An example for unmediated interaction would be cooking. What you chop is what you get