"You can treat a lot of software as a set of mechanical problems versus abstract ideas." I disagree. There are a lot of things in software that have no counter

"You can treat a lot of software as a set of mechanical problems versus abstract ideas." I disagree. There are a lot of things in software that have no counterpart in the physical world and that definitely obey no law of physics besides self-consistency, so I'd call them abstract and not mechanical. Sometimes you'll be able to visualize some parts of the system as "mechanical" but if you stick to that representation you'll never be able to see the bigger picture.