It's a little cool kung fu master cryptic, but what he means is that before you start boxing a punch is something you think you understand. It's hitting someone with your fist. Simple concept. Then, if you practice boxing you quickly build up an increasingly complex vocabulary: light-footed jab, leaping lead hook, low cross. You learn that a counter to a looping right hook is quick stiff jab and that it's very hard to get power into a straight punch if you are moving backwards. Then (when you get to Bruce Lee level) you leave those definitions behind. A punch is a punch. Even though there are infinite variations, you don't need all those words. The complexity is implied and understandable.

This is similar to a lot of other things. At first, designing web sites was just designing web sites. No one knew what they were doing really. Then when people had enough experience, learned new ways of doing things & technology advanced they realized "hey, these websites are really software not documents and they're mostly about users creating content and interacting with each other!" So we got Web 2.0 . I think we're back to web design is just web design. "Creating software that lets users interact with each other" is implied.

Same with number crunching. Number crunching-> big data -> number crunching.

If the trend continues, we can expect Big Data aircraft designers and Big Data astrophysics software.