In CS literature, this programming model is called "stream computing."
I work on System S, which is the research name of IBM's InfoSphere Streams, which is a distributed, realtime (edit: soft realtime; so, high throughput, low latency, but not hard realtime with guaranteed deadlines) streaming system with an associated language. Another project in this area is Storm. See this comment thread for more on that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3193115
But, Anic seems to be more related to the kind of streaming languages that came from the digital signal processing and embedded worlds. See, for example, the StreamIt project: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/streamit/
Note that Streams, Storm, Anic, StreamIt all have the same underlying programming model, but Streams and Storm target a different area than Anic and StreamIt. Streams and Storm target the emerging area of "big data" where you need to distribute your computation across a cluster. Anic and StreamIt are lower level: applications such as video decoding are streaming in nature, but one typically implements them on a single chip, and often even in hardware.
Standard disclaimer: my views are not official IBM views.
I've been greatly interested in ANI-like dataflow programming languages for a long time now (though maybe not with ANI's crazy syntax). I would encourage you to give it a try! Don't let the existence of other languages hold you off (and in any case, ANI can be considered dead).
Take it and improve on it. I'd also experimented with puzzling out a syntax for a language like this and it's very exciting to see something that actually does it. Read through the tutorial. The syntax looks awful but is actually very coherent once you get into it. As an aside, getting there first doesn't matter. Doing it best is what matters in the long run. Apple, google, Facebook, etc.
I work on System S, which is the research name of IBM's InfoSphere Streams, which is a distributed, realtime (edit: soft realtime; so, high throughput, low latency, but not hard realtime with guaranteed deadlines) streaming system with an associated language. Another project in this area is Storm. See this comment thread for more on that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3193115
But, Anic seems to be more related to the kind of streaming languages that came from the digital signal processing and embedded worlds. See, for example, the StreamIt project: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/streamit/
In particular, a StreamIt tutorial: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/streamit/papers/streamit-coo...
Note that Streams, Storm, Anic, StreamIt all have the same underlying programming model, but Streams and Storm target a different area than Anic and StreamIt. Streams and Storm target the emerging area of "big data" where you need to distribute your computation across a cluster. Anic and StreamIt are lower level: applications such as video decoding are streaming in nature, but one typically implements them on a single chip, and often even in hardware.
Standard disclaimer: my views are not official IBM views.