That's great. It reminds me of a comment by Rich Hickey, the inventor of Clojure:
" Before we had all this high falutin' opinions of ourselves as programmers and computer scientists and stuff like that, programming used to be called data processing.
How many people actually do data processing in their programs? You can raise your hands. We all do, right? This is what most programs do. You take some information in, somebody typed some stuff, somebody sends you a message, you put it somewhere. Later you try to find it. You put it on the screen. You send it to somebody else.
That is what most programs do most of the time. Sure, there is a computational aspect to programs. There is quality of implementation issues to this, but there is nothing wrong with saying: programs process data. Because data is information. Information systems ... this should be what we are doing, right?
We are the stewards of the world's information. And information is just data. It is not a complex thing. It is not an elaborate thing. It is a simple thing, until we programmers start touching it.
So we have data processing. Most programs do this. There are very few programs that do not.
And data is a fundamentally simple thing. Data is just raw immutable information. So that is the first point. Data is immutable. If you make a data structure, you can start messing with that, but actual data is immutable. So if you have a representation for it that is also immutable, you are capturing its essence better than if you start fiddling around.
And that is what happens. Languages fiddle around. They elaborate on data. They add types. They add methods. They make data active. They make data mutable. They make data movable. They turn it into an agent, or some active thing. And at that point they are ruining it. At least, they are moving it away from what it is."
" Before we had all this high falutin' opinions of ourselves as programmers and computer scientists and stuff like that, programming used to be called data processing.
How many people actually do data processing in their programs? You can raise your hands. We all do, right? This is what most programs do. You take some information in, somebody typed some stuff, somebody sends you a message, you put it somewhere. Later you try to find it. You put it on the screen. You send it to somebody else.
That is what most programs do most of the time. Sure, there is a computational aspect to programs. There is quality of implementation issues to this, but there is nothing wrong with saying: programs process data. Because data is information. Information systems ... this should be what we are doing, right?
We are the stewards of the world's information. And information is just data. It is not a complex thing. It is not an elaborate thing. It is a simple thing, until we programmers start touching it.
So we have data processing. Most programs do this. There are very few programs that do not.
And data is a fundamentally simple thing. Data is just raw immutable information. So that is the first point. Data is immutable. If you make a data structure, you can start messing with that, but actual data is immutable. So if you have a representation for it that is also immutable, you are capturing its essence better than if you start fiddling around.
And that is what happens. Languages fiddle around. They elaborate on data. They add types. They add methods. They make data active. They make data mutable. They make data movable. They turn it into an agent, or some active thing. And at that point they are ruining it. At least, they are moving it away from what it is."
https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...