Not to sound pedantic, but in this case the "user" data wouldn't have existed without the product, so it's not exactly like an artist's work. It's not surprising it is a challenge to find a traditional parallel for the new complexities of this century.
I have been working through SICP. In Chapter 2 they introduce Church Numerals. I wrote a blog post recently demonstrating by the method of substitution how arithmetic operators on Church numerals finally break down to work. Would appreciate your comments about it.
EDIT: Here it is: http://lambdapilgrim.posterous.com/numbers-without-numerals
I would like to give my enthusiastic vote to Racket as I am working through SICP exercises in Dr Racket. I find it very simple to use IDE. It just gets out of your way to perform simple REPL, has separate definitions and console panels. Its debugging feature is fairly intuitive. It also has more advanced features when one is ready for it.
I will try my short explanation that I have been telling myself since the first time I heard this question. Imagine a mirror on the ceiling. From the same understanding that we are judging the image to be flipped left to right, we will now notice that the image is flipped top to bottom.
Explanation: Imagine a stick without width whose image is reflected in the mirror on the ceiling. If we superimpose the image on the stick, haven't we flipped top and bottom?
Great utility! This makes even more sense to a viewer like me who has shifted entirely to streamed content. The devices I own as part of home entertainment setup play my shows at a time I want (simple yet effective idea of giving your time back to you).
This easily is the future of TV viewing, and moki.tv fills a very visible gap of connecting the viewer to the content.
My best wishes for your growth. You just got one new registered user.