Thoughts on minimize code and maximize data philosophy

Question

I have heard of the concept of minimizing code and maximizing data, and was wondering what advice other people can give me on how/why I should do this when building my own syste

Answer 1

In languages in which code can be treated as data it is a non-issue. You use what's clear, brief, and maintainable, leaning towards data, code, functional, OO, or procedural, as the solution requires.

In procedural, the distinction is marked, and we tend to think about data as something stored in an specific way, but even in procedural it is best to hide the data behind an API, or behind an object in OO.

A lookup(avalue) can be reimplemented in many different ways during its lifetime, as long as its starts as a function.

...All the time I desing programs for nonexisting machines and add: 'if we now had a machine comprising the primitives here assumed, then the job is done.' ... In actual practice, of course, this ideal machine will turn out not to exist, so our next task --structurally similar to the original one-- is to program the simulation of the "upper" machine... But this bunch of programs is written for a machine that in all probability will not exist, so our next job will be to simulate it in terms of programs for a next lower level machine, etc., until finally we have a program that can be executed by our hardware...

E. W. Dijkstra in Notes on Structured Programming, 1969, as quoted by John Allen, in Anatomy of Lisp, 1978.