> Reality has no distinction between "data" and "code"

yes, yes, ostensibly the universe is built on lisp.

But we all know that it was hacked together with a lot of perl[1].

[1] you all know the reference.

One of the best thing I done for my career (as a self taught software developer, but with a degree in electronic engineering) is to learn computation theory.

Computation is math (and a very restricted subset of math). It’s mostly specific sequences of sets manipulation. What sets and what manipulations are defined by people, not by the idea of computation.

The best thing is that as soon as you specify the sequences of manipulation, it become a a set that you can manipulate. That can be a difficult concept to grasp, but that’s what helps in designing notation that are more appropriate for the human mind to describe a solution for a specific problem.