Data flow is the fundamental tenet by which LabVIEW code is written. The basic philosophy is that the passage of data through nodes within the program determines the order of execution of the functions of the program. LabVIEW VI's have inputs, process data and produce outputs. By chaining together VI's that have common inputs and outputs it is possible to arrange the functions in the order by which the programmer wants the data to be manipulated.
Often a single input is used as a common "thread" running through several VI's and the program to force the order of operations. Examples include the error cluster or the refnum data structure.
An example of how dataflow works and how LabVIEW differs from textual languages is given in [1] this PDF titled LabVIEW and G as a Computing Language Course.
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Data flow
