Programmers love to come up with abstractions that they see in other fields. 99% of the time these are well-known inside the field. Reminds me of that medical paper that got published where the researcher rediscovered numerical integration.

>Perhaps that's because it is not inherently Linguistics?

I can admit that linguistics is a specific field of knowledge and has certain methodologies associated with it that are not always fitting or practical for all forms of analysis, but I think it's still inappropriate to say that any investigation into the operation of (spoken) language is not in some way a form of "linguistics."