[harry8]

I thought maybe you were referring to a known text or paper.

"whitehead and Hickey" search links back to this comment and only one other thing that can't be relevant.

So, WTF are you talking about that we should know it and search engines don't?

[jsty]

Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk discusses value and time - how mutability ties these together such that value is always time-dependent - and the complexity that results.

https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

[nicklaf]

Google turns up a Clojure library called Avout [0].

The library itself isn't too important here, but its website cites the philosophy of Rich Hickey and Alfred North Whitehead on state being an illusion:

Rich Hickey has spoken eloquently on mutable state in his talk "Are We There Yet?" [1]. To summarize, Rich and Alfred North Whitehead [2] don't believe in mutable state, it's an illusion. Rather, there are only successions of causally-linked immutable values, and time is derived from the perception of these successions. Causally-linked means the future is a function of the past; processes apply pure functions to immutable values to derive new immutable values, and we assign identity to these chains of values, and perceive change where there is none.

Hickey's talk itself is quite interesting and goes into detail on the relevance of Whitehead's ideas in his book Process and Reality to concurrent programming.

[0] https://avout.io/

[1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hi...

[2] https://archive.org/details/AlfredNorthWhiteheadProcessAndRe...