Since its inception, computers were based on the model of a machine traversed by data that are processed like sausages in a mincer, as data was fed directly on hardware which had code assembled as physical wires.<p>However, the software part of the machines is made of the same material as the data, so they are much closer to what current programming languages seem to imply.<p>It is natural that they tend to converge, especially in Lisp-like languages, into a type of program where the structure has code and data intermingled, which organically co-evolve in the directions in which problem solving takes it.<p>Instead of a machine with a processing pipeline, a closer metaphor might be the phloem of plants, the living cells that transport food, and which form part of the plant's structure and grow along with it.<p>(BTW I've coined a name for that kind of self-rendered cells, processed in place as collections of data sharing the same structure; I call them <i>'wits'</i> - as in, <i>the minimum unit of meaning</i>; in parallel to bits as the minimum unit of information. And if you look closely, you'll begin to see that a lot of modern programming systems have them everywhere. So you may want to use this term 'a <i>wit</i>' to describe the concept explained in the article.)