I think you might be right in this case that practical use preceded theoretical understanding but that's not really my point. Software development certainly has

I think you might be right in this case that practical use preceded theoretical understanding but that's not really my point. Software development certainly has examples of pseudo-math (for example there was a trend a few years back to write JavaScript that could run on both the server and the client. For reasons passing understanding, this was called "isomorphic" by some practitioners). All I meant was that ADTs are not that.