> Random anecdote: I still have a fond memory of a glorious realization in Haskell after a colleague told me "if you design your data types right, the program just falls into place".

There's a similar quote from The Mythical Man Month [0, page 102]:

> Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.

And a somewhat related one from Linus [1]:

> I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

[0]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15712-s19/www/p...

[1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/193245/