Comment by chubot

2 years ago

Yup, the "Everything is an X" link is in the appendix to the second post :)

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html#wiki...

I call it the Perlis-Thompson Principle, after Perlis:

It's better to have 100 functions on 1 data structure than 10 functions and 10 data structures.

and Thompson:

A program is generally exponentially complicated by the number of notions that it invents for itself. To reduce this complication to a minimum, you have to make the number of notions zero or one, which are two numbers that can be raised to any power without disturbing this concept. Since you cannot achieve much with zero notions, it is my belief that you should base systems on a single notion.