The idea of code as data is something that's been churning around in the heads of my colleagues and me for a while now. Compiler optimization in particular is

The idea of code as data is something that's been churning around in the heads of my colleagues and me for a while now. Compiler optimization in particular is something that can really benefit from this view: The typical fixpoint-style approach of writing optimizers usually requires a ton of fine-tuning in the rules (e.g., manually triggering one rule after a second one fires), and you're still limited to how big a query you can run. On the other hand, start thinking of the optimizer like an IVM system... not could we automate a lot of the hand-tuning, but we can start thinking of scalable cross-module optimizations.