I've heard others give the same argument, but I don't find it very compelling. There's no rule that says that science cannot be applied to purely human endeavor

I've heard others give the same argument, but I don't find it very compelling. There's no rule that says that science cannot be applied to purely human endeavors. We would not say that sociology is not a science, even though it is a study of a purely human concept. Science is simply a method of increasing your knowledge of a system. It doesn't matter if that system is the bare physical universe, the chemical interactions within a cell, or the flow of data and logic in a computer program. One unambiguous application of the scientific method to computing is in debugging. Your program behaves unexpectedly – aha! a new phenomenon. The lateral thinking hardware in your brain engages as you tinker around, reproducing the bug and noticing the conditions in which it happens. You gather all of this together with your existing knowledge of the system, and come up with an explanation for the bug – a hypothesis! Then you try to falsify your hypothesis. You might try to falsify it by watching a value in the debugger, for example. Or you might modify your program and see if the bug persists or changes its behavior. You aren't usually recording all of this on paper, because in this case you don't care much about presenting your findings to others. Others will be satisfied if the bug is gone. And of course, you probably aren't thinking of the words "hypothesis" and "experiment". But that's what you did, and that's why you figured out the bug. (On the other hand, some programmers try to debug their programs by poking and picking randomly at their code until they get it working. I would urge them to try adopting a scientific approach. It's not just a way to satisfy a teacher in a chemistry lab, as it turns out.)