What does HackerNews think of cells?
A Common Lisp implementation of the dataflow programming paradigm
https://github.com/kennytilton/cells
and he has slides from a talk
https://github.com/kennytilton/cells/blob/main/Lisp-NYC-2018...
to give context.
https://github.com/kennytilton/cells
"Spreadsheet-like expressiveness for CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System."
He used this to write a GUI called "Cello":
I haven't had occasion to use Cells, but I'm glad to be reminded of it, as I may have a use for it soon.
While you can do that, Python doesn't make your life easier if you want to go functional, really. There's only map/reduce/filter, one-line lambdas (that get really messy really fast), no currying, etc. (however, comprehensions are fine)
I appreciate the effort of the OP in questioning the fact of dataflow implementations, and I suggest him to further explore the world of functional languages - it's huge and resourceful, while the quality of the content written is surprisingly high on average - as he may even find a working implementation for the problem he was trying to solve (happens way too often to me).
BTW, a quick google brought me to this [1] - I'm not sure if it's exactly what we are talking about, but seems related.