I wish universal and eternal patterns like this were studied more often in software engineering. Perhaps we would have a chance in hell of finding canonical representations of common structures and even programs instead of basket weaving majors fucking reinventing the wheel every 5 minutes with yet another half-baked poorly understood Python or JavaScript instantiation of a common pattern. Imagine still writing for loops and munging indices instead of expressing things in terms of higher order functions like folds or maps...

Eh, I don't need to imagine; we're still stuck at that same level of infantilism. Instead of actually graduating to higher order atoms and primitives of thought though, we can just have the AI slop out another 100k LOC. Then the system will have so much incidental complexity that it becomes impossible to distill out its essence, because there no longer is one.

While I agree that we keep reinventing stuff, in CS doesn't the ease of creating isomorphisms between different ways of doing things mean that canonicalization will always be a matter of some community choosing their favorite form, perhaps based on aesthetic or cultural reasons, rather than anything "universal and eternal"?