My take on this is that computation is the act of describing different states that the processor can be in - or describing the path from one state to the next.

My take on this is that computation is the act of describing different states that the processor can be in - or describing the path from one state to the next. I think an understanding of state is fundamental - one thing that brought this home to me was a talk I watched given by Sophie Wilson [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson] in which she displayed an image of a cpu. The image showed a 'path' across the cpu that was the current state, the next image showed a different path describing a different state. The path was a lot like a bolt of lightening. An understanding of functional programming (FP) matches this a bit more directly than OO as FP is a pipeline of functions that describes state change and it is easy to reason about the state at any point in the pipeline. OO represents a real world object so you are encouraged to think about the problem you are modelling rather than the how to represent different states. But obviously in the end they both describe state and logic that describes state transition.