Introduction. The main intellectual competence of IT professionals includes culture of thinking, the ability to generalize, analyze, and perceive information. But what do we mean by the culture of thinking today? If it is based on consistency and creativity, as leading IT-companies require from university graduates, it immediately indicates the complexity and even inconsistency of the requirements for the expected qualities of thinking from newly-qualified professionals. Because, on the one hand, they need to be able to systematize the available data into a certain structure; on the other hand, they have to abandon the existing one and achieve a fundamentally different solution.
The purpose of this article is to identify the core of thinking tools in professional practice and describe precisely them using set-theoretical analysis.
Materials and Methods. We proceed from the fact that thinking, as a part of the nature of reality, reaches the level required for professional practice when it satisfies at least three conditions: stability, accuracy and completeness of the description of a particular system or process. Since we cannot extract thinking from historical and cultural way of cognition, which is sometimes called an episteme, it is necessary, first of all, to rely on examples of such a context as the evolution of the linguistic state of the human population and the evolution of the architecture of the design of distributed systems in the information space. The mathematical basis is taken from the experience of teaching and using the set-theoretical method in mathematics disciplines within computer fields of study.
Results. Within the framework of the proposed methodology, some important tools of professional thinking are formulated in the precise language of computer science. The structures of stable retention of objective thinking, the accuracy of retention of meaning, the minimum completeness of the system, bricolage and the option of the basic figure of creativity visualization are described. This methodology allows to see the logic of branching in the evolution of different languages, as well as the logic of the evolution of software systems.
Conclusions. The set-theoretical tools of thinking reveal the logic within the development of distributed systems in the modern information environment and, apparently, significantly affect the tools of thinking in various fields of knowledge.