Comment by aeonik

I agree with the author, we need better primitives, if you need functionality now:

Major tools that exist today for partial structure traversal and focused manipulation:

- Optics (Lenses, Prisms, Traversals)

  Elegant, composable ways to zoom into, modify, and rebuild structures.

  Examples: Haskell's `lens`, Scala's Monocle, Clojure's Specter.

  Think of these as programmable accessors and updaters.

- Zippers

  Data structures with a "focused cursor" that allow local edits without manually traversing the whole structure.

  Examples: Huet’s original Zipper (1997), Haskell’s `Data.Tree.Zipper`, Clojure’s built-in zippers.

- Query Languages (for semantic traversal and deep search)

  When paths aren't enough and you need semantic conditionals:

    - SPARQL (semantic web graph querying)
    - Datalog (logic programming and query over facts)
    - Cypher (graph traversal in Neo4j)
    - Prolog (pure logic exploration)

  These approaches let you declaratively state what you want instead of manually specifying traversal steps.