AbstractData‐oriented workflows are often used in scientific applications for executing a set of dependent tasks across multiple computers. We discuss how these can be modeled using lambda calculus, and how ideas from functional programming are applicable in the design of workflows. Such an approach avoids the restrictions often found in workflow languages, permitting the implementation of complex application in logic and data manipulation. This paper explains why lambda calculus is an appropriate model for workflow representation, and how a suitably efficient implementation can provide a wide range of capabilities to developers. The presented approach also permits high‐level workflow features to be implemented at user level, in terms of a small set of low‐level primitives provided by the language implementation. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.