[abeppu]

While I agree that we keep reinventing stuff, in CS doesn't the ease of creating isomorphisms between different ways of doing things mean that canonicalization will always be a matter of some community choosing their favorite form, perhaps based on aesthetic or cultural reasons, rather than anything "universal and eternal"?

[rdevilla]

We can still speak of equivalence classes under said isomorphisms and choose a representative out of them, up to the aesthetic preferences of the implementor. We are nowhere near finding equivalence classes or isomorphisms between representations because the things being compared are probably not equal, thanks to all the burrs and rough corners of incidental (non essential) complexity.