[gggtt]

Dataflow, Pipelines, Signal Processing block diagrams, Functional programming, Flow-Based programming, Blender/Unreal Shader Graphs, The Grid in Bitwig, PureData/Max, VHDL, MATLAB Simulink, Node Red, Microservices, Tensorflow/Pytorch compute graphs, Houdini, Animation/behaviour graphs Unreal Blueprints, ...

There are so many things that we describe as a graph of boxes with inputs & outputs that we can indeed draw many parallels see many similarities between them. I think it's quite interesting to think about this diversity of tools and try to analyse what's common and what isn't between them (some are stateless others aren't, some have the notion of "time" and some have not, some are closer to state machines while other closer to mathematical functions, etc.) and it gives a lot of inspiration about new/alternative programming models & architectures

[sali0]

This (boxes with inputs and outputs) is how I reason about almost everything in life as well. I have been told this is what is called "systems thinking". Your comment is spot on.