In the a similar spirit, here is another research paper that Simon Peyton Jones is a coauthor of: Build Systems à la Carte[1]. It describes a formalism for representing build systems and classifies the recalculation algorithm in Excel as a type of build system:
View maintenance, rendering and compilation are instances of the same underlying problem: efficient incremental calculation of an acyclic computation graph, a.k.a. differential dataflow. When the graph has cycles or feedback, you enter control theory country. It’s not surprising that neural nets look like feedback control systems.
I've been interested in the theoretical side of this since forever (my first love was node based CGI software which actually exposes the graph as your main interface) and never go to it. Any control theory book suggestion before I hit springer ?
[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...