This reminds me of a quote about Blender, which I find has a remarkably solid architecture based on the idea of interactively editing a sort of “scene database”

This reminds me of a quote about Blender, which I find has a remarkably solid architecture based on the idea of interactively editing a sort of “scene database”: “Although some jokingly called Blender a ‘struct visualizer’, the name is actually quite accurate. During the first months of Blender's development, we did little but devise structures and write include files. During the years that followed, mostly tools and visualization methods were worked out.” And the architecture of a compiler I’ve been working on has gotten considerably simpler and more solid as I’ve figured out the right data structures—with the right data model, especially if it’s enforced with types, the code practically writes itself. Finding that model is the hard part.