(2003-05-22) McGrath Data Code

Sean McGrath rethinks the boundary between code and data. It's all just "text". Let's generalize code and data to be merely specific examples of text. Does that help? Well, the main reason for separating code and data is to better "manage" each. We live in a world in which, from a development perspective, code is code and data is data. Code lives in source code control systems (CVS), data lives in databases (Data Store) or XML documents. East is East and West is West. The twain ideally would not meet until deployment time. Perhaps this is how we should revisit the problem - by revisiting the very notion of "text" in our computer systems. What if every text editor on the planet was a Folding text editor that could seamlessly transclude (Transclusion) text from one location into another? With such a capability we could manage code and data separately, but by simply opening up a different "view" on them, see them as a merged entity consisting of both code and data. Best of both worlds? (Hmmm, a side approach to Node Web?)