>Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

Isn’t this a plug for some sort of object oriented programming? Or at least highly structured programming? Interesting in today’s trendy clime of “objects bad/passe, function(al) good.”

Having done quite a bit of OOP where “binding behavior to data” is the thing in an ideal laboratory for it (Smalltalk and others), I gained some experience with watching people do this. I observed that there were plenty of good ideas across the industry on how to model data (inheritance, prototype, classification, mixins, mutability,etc), but what I observed is that which data groups together well is very much an art, and that was where people struggle to succeed with the data centric emphasis. The easy objects/structs are of course easy, Point, Rect, Person. But as the data got more complex, getting people to come up with good boundaries gets more and complex quickly, and you ended up with really poor object constitutions. Reification is hard. I don’t think it is impossible, I’ve seen people who have a knack for reification come in a refactor an object soup into a cluster of data structures that was beautiful. But yeah, good reification I fear is as much an art as science.