Lenses, Folds, and Traversals

If you want to work in an environment where a lot of people are thinking like this routinely, instead of a few lone voices in a vast sea of otherwise uninterested people, the Haskell community is doing a lot of work in this area, and able to move much faster since it's so much easier in Haskell than C++ templates (which isn't really a criticism of C++ templates, a lot of their capabilities are accidental rather than intended). This is why the Haskell community talks so much about monoids and applicatives and semigroups and a variety of other interesting structures in that area (and no, I did not forget to say monad, that structure is actually uninteresting here because it is too powerful). I believe the Fortress language is also doing some work here. A sample of the interesting sort of algorithm work that you can do when you think this way: [link] Edit: See also the Typeclassopedia: [link] And if you're really interested and want to take it hardcore, Edward Kmett's video on his lens library walks through how you can derive it with this sort of logic: [this video]