Adventures in tearing

[Michael Fogus]

I suspect that many on the list are interested in ways that
programming languages pull apart ideas that were previously thought to
be inseparable. A few interesting examples off the top of my head
include:

* Kernel pulls apart lambda into $vau and wrap (described briefly at
http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html)

* Wat pulls apart type definition, creation, tags and access
(described briefly at
http://axisofeval.blogspot.com/2012/08/schemes-missing-ingredient.html)

* Clojure pulls apart transformation from data representation and
order in its reducers library (described at
http://clojure.com/blog/2012/05/08/reducers-a-library-and-model-for-collection-processing.html)

So my questions are:

1. What are more interesting adventures in tearing?

2. What has yet to be torn, but could be?

[Bob Nystrom]

The first one that comes to my mind are multimethod-based languages
which tear apart the definition of a type and the methods that are
specialized on it.

Other languages like Go and ones that allow monkey-patching enable
this too, but multimethod ones have it most deeply ingrained.

Cheers!

- bob