Data is Code

I was just reading a post by David Humphrey. In it he speaks about a visit Mike Shaver (of Mozilla fame) paid his class. Here's an interesting excerpt:

I also enjoyed one off-hand comment he made in response to a question about design patterns in the code. “Increasingly,” he said, “the patterns in Mozilla borrow more and more from the web itself.” I’ve been reflecting on this same point a lot lately, namely, that unlike most applications that tightly house data within structured silos, Mozilla invites its data to cross the application boundary and become part of its inner-being. The web isn’t something that Mozilla renders. Mozilla is a part of the web itself.

It's very interesting seeing the "data is code; code is data" meme spreading around the net. Even if it's spread is slow.

If you want to learn on a more about this concept, let me suggest this lisp tutorial, this classic, and of course this.