Data is like clay

A nice metaphor from Jon Udell, with yet another reason for liking scripting languages.

...data is a substance, like clay, that you have to pound on, roll out, squeeze, mold, and generally get your hands dirty with, in order to discover its possibilities. Over the years I've come to see that the ability to treat data like clay is a primary benefit of languages such as Perl and Python. If you had to finalize your data structures up front you'd never get anywhere, because they're emergent.

This came in an entry about Xquery, which is a topic I know really nothing about.