Rich Hickey actually did a talk called "Language of the System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROor6_NGIWU way back in 2013 before core.async was even created that lays out a lot of the ideas. It even has a big section explicitly about "flow" which contains the germs of core.async.flow.

Perhaps this is a good place to start reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proce...