I think you're making a dangerous correlation between the determinism of software and the supposed determinism of skill at software development. Yes, one of the

I think you're making a dangerous correlation between the determinism of software and the supposed determinism of skill at software development. Yes, one of the most important aspects of software development is making code that runs correctly, but that is not the only aspect. Even if we focus on that alone, we run into many issues: - How do we determine whether anything but the most trivial program is correct? - Are the specifications so clearly defined that you could actually say your program is "correct" assuming that you could reason perfectly about its behavior? If you are the one writing the specifications, you know that the preceding question has no answer, because the specifications are just as hard to match to the problem as the program is to match to the specifications. - Can a program be said to be complete and production-ready if both it and the specifications are correct? What about security, performance, legacy support, and other concerns? Correctness, even if you take that alone, is not so simple. Even if it was simple, that's not the only metric for measuring skill in software development, and it's not the only (or even most) important thing to focus on.