Yes this type of mathematical formalism unlies so many systems. Most of us tend to use intuition while dealing with them (most programmers for example) but you can also deal with them algebraically. In theory this stuff should be useful to a much wider group than the mathematicians that developed it.
The thing about algebra is that you can shuffle something around using standard operations and if you follow the rules you can be sure that what you did is correct. Correctness is something that you can see rather than having to prove it to yourself with a debugger.
I don’t really know anything about R but if it’s programming then maybe there’s a library of functions that you can use. In JavaScript you can use the Ramda or Lodash/FP libraries plus a few abstractions. It’s better if the language is more focused on this stuff though (Haskell, F# etc)
John Hardy Developer 
John Hardy Turnbull delenda est Looking at that first diagram I’m thinking this is a really good model for documenting components and supporting service calls.https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/zTxI4wBDAQ82wrD0XNnQr-VLLkgmb044D3Vl6sUUCgiWvjxjqlPeUeV-geqFET632b5NZNY-l3k
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Yes this type of mathematical formalism unlies so many systems. Most of us tend to use intuition while dealing with them (most programmers for example) but you can also deal with them algebraically. In theory this stuff should be useful to a much wider group than the mathematicians that developed it.
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The thing about algebra is that you can shuffle something around using standard operations and if you follow the rules you can be sure that what you did is correct. Correctness is something that you can see rather than having to prove it to yourself with a debugger.
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I wish there was a library in R that would allow me to build out these types of diagrams from all the relationships I currently track in excel?
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I don’t really know anything about R but if it’s programming then maybe there’s a library of functions that you can use. In JavaScript you can use the Ramda or Lodash/FP libraries plus a few abstractions. It’s better if the language is more focused on this stuff though (Haskell, F# etc)
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John Hardy Turnbull delenda est actually, you can’t prove corectness with a debugger. You can only show existance of bugs.
It is like using anecdotal prof.
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