[swift]

This looks great, and I encourage you to keep working on it and make this a reality. I've thought along the same lines and I think a language like this has real potential.

I'm pretty surprised I haven't seen J. Paul Morrison's "Flow-Based Programming" mentioned anywhere in the post or these comments. I first read this book years ago as a undergrad and it made a big impact on me. It discusses ideas very similar to the ones proposed for Glow. You can read it free online here:

http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/fbp/

You can find links to several existing implementations of flow-based programming on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming