> Maybe I've just been reading all of the right books. The sad thing is, by reading books at all you're already way ahead. The flexibility data-driven program

> Maybe I've just been reading all of the right books. The sad thing is, by reading books at all you're already way ahead. The flexibility data-driven programs have is why people say that "data is code" (the flipside of Lisp's "code is data"). Also, I found working with ML (OCaml, in my case) made thinking in terms of types and overall data-structure design much clearer. It's a major strength of the language, and spending some time with it will probably give you insights usable in most other languages. ML was designed by people who knew Lisp quite well, and felt that (for some problems - in their case, theorem proving) it would be greatly improved by having a better type system.