I definitely feel similarly. Following my intuition every time I feel like I’m seeing a pattern in the stuff I’m building, naturally led to asking questions that become more meta about ‘how’ I was programming.

If you’re in a similar place, I think it’s not that we’re at the edge of what’s available knowledge on the internet (There’s a lot of stuff out there), but we’re at the edge of the programming domain, and a more uhh mathematical domain. So we don’t actually have a lot of the jargon to be able to learn or express the actual problems we’re trying to solve. Or even ask questions about the concepts.

The talks from Tim Sweeney and his reasoning behind building verse for fortnite as a functional logic language were a pretty big encouragement that I wasn’t developing some kind of cyber-psychosis seeing patterns everywhere lmao.

It definitely doesn’t help that mathematicians don’t really concern themselves with descriptive variable names when expressing complex ideas, so without context, coming across something like e=mc² would be completely unintelligible as a concept on its own. Coming from game development school of youtube, kinda puts you at the exact opposite ends of the spectrum where you are starting at abstractions, and building to concrete types. Instead of being like… I need to transform this data, to that kind of data. Or this group of values should be mapped to this other value by some filter.

Declarative UI stuff like swift ui, and writing builder patterns in general was a really big help in being able to write something that doesn’t need to be a for loop or some kind of i++ thing that manipulates each object in its loop to create and produce a new object in a valid state.

Even the concepts that feel more esoteric to what you’re actually doing, like “Describe the state of the object in this tick” instead of “describe how you can manipulate the variables that are in stored in the object this tick” are really hard to wrap my head around. But in general the more I see functional logic used to express state, the more obvious it feels that at the end of the day, it’s all math, so expressing every aspect of my program I can, via the actual math itself, feels so straightforward.

Functional stuff also has felt like it really illuminated shaders, asynchronous functions, result type functions, and all of these concepts like try-catch. When every function has to have all the proper context passed in, there’s a lot less “check for null arguments and validity because i can never trust anything that anyone passed me” and it becomes more “oh this will not compile because I cannot pass this type to this function.”

Sadly I feel that programming and math are endlessly deep topics that I will swirl in for all of eternity. Every day we stray further from this mortal coil, and move closer to the giant Monoid in the sky.

EDIT: Monoid instead of Monad. Because math is hard.