I've only used them in dotnet, I would be very interested to read any strong opinions about the use of Streams both in practice and as an abstract point in API design.
Streams are how modern operating systems work, most commonly to transfer audio, video, file system, and network data from hardware to channels available for applications. So a common scenario is to stream data from a file and pipe it to a network interface for transfer to other computers or to a web browser.
austin-cheney|2 days ago