> digital work only deals with "ideal" objects, which simplifies a lot

I'm not clear what you mean by that. Most of the library code I deal with is far from ideal (IMO). Even most of the things I implement aren't ideal because either I'm interacting with the real world or even if not I don't want to spend unlimited time fully generalizing it.

As a concrete example, absolutely nothing that touches floating point arithmetic is "ideal" in any sense of the word.