8. On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing

Charles Petzold

Among the pearls of wisdom and wackiness chronicled in Steven Levy's classic history Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday), my favorite is this one by Bill Gosper, who once said, "Data is just a dumb kind of programming." The corollary, of course, is that code is just a smart kind of data—data designed to trigger processors into performing certain useful or amusing acts.