Alan Kay is quoted as saying, after reading John McCarthy’s LISP-1.5 manual: « that was the big revelation to me […] when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over. »
In my (humble) opinion and more generally, I think that the roots of coding can be built on a more simple foundation, a simple text rewriting process.
See more in the linked page. Your (gentle) opinion is welcome...