Maybe not novel, but I think the author is describing an "A-Ha" moment that most programmers have to go through at some point. I think most new programmers don'

Maybe not novel, but I think the author is describing an "A-Ha" moment that most programmers have to go through at some point. I think most new programmers don't think about data, they think about goals. "I want this sprite to move from here to there, and when you press a button a laser comes out of the gun" or "I want to make a webpage that lets you create polls for Twitter". They think about the end results and just mess around with data structures until they accomplish their goals. This style of programming is very brittle and breaks as soon as you change your goals. Moving to a mental model where you think about data first, and that your goals are an expression of that underlying data leads to simpler code and more robust architectures that can be expanded as needed.