I don't understand your objection. Letter recognition takes a bitmap, and sorts it into one of 26 categories, cucumber grading takes a bitmap, and sorts it into

I don't understand your objection. Letter recognition takes a bitmap, and sorts it into one of 26 categories, cucumber grading takes a bitmap, and sorts it into one of 9 categories. Of course it's reductionist. Generalizing an abstraction across many things that superficially look different is what programmers do. Reducing problem complexity to make something easier to automate is what programming is for. Saying cucumber grading is like letter recognition is a true generalization that is also useful. Saying that they're both "adding a bunch of numbers" is a true generalization that is less useful. Programming, and (way more) broadly, science and engineering itself, is about finding useful generalizations.