A phrase that cropped up a couple of times was the old saw that “Data == Code” – it’s very hard to avoid the idea once you start talking about code generation or Domain Specific Pidgins, parsing… I first came across the idea in The Structure And Interpretation of Computer Programs where it’s elegantly phrased as “Data is just dumb code, and code is just smart data”. Traditionally, the idea seems to be attributed to John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp. But it’s older than that. Way older than that. The idea is actually older than Computer Science. It lies at the core of Turing’s original paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem in which invents computer science on the way to proving that it’s impossible to decide algorithmically whether a given statement of arithmetic is true or false.

(Piers Cawley, Piers Cawley Practices Punditry, Code is data, and it always has been)