A lot of what we do day to day has arbitrary bits to it. This, I’ve tried to explain to you, is deep and not arbitrary. We are discovering things rather than inventing things. Clearly that has to have implications everywhere and there’s a growing movement that says, “look, the ways of thought applied in computing - the things that you guys are all good at - give us new insights into how information is structured.”
And structuring of information is not going to just be important for understanding how computers should be designed. It can also be important for understanding how the universe works. So this idea of using ideas, of how information is structured, to examine many, many different fields goes by the name of informatics.
FROM:Strange Loop Conference'Propositions as Types' by Philip Wadler
Software engineering as applied logical research.
Josh Beckman