There are quite a few interesting computer science artefacts in Drupal. I'm going to try to highlight a few of them. Sorry, this is unfinished, and might not be finished ever, but I'm just trying to capture a snapshot of confused meandering thoughts.

Very late, dynamic binding

Late binding came to popular life with the advent of object oriented languages. Essentially it means binding of values, for example functions, to names at object creation, as opposed to compile or link time. In drupal, this can happen at any time, more even, it is algorithmic - that is you can change at runtime what is to be executed at a specific control point. The hook system is one of the ways to do it.

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