Well, it runs on a CPU with mutable state. So you could claim that everything is all about mutation of state. But that's not a very useful position to take, b

Well, it runs on a CPU with mutable state. So you could claim that everything is all about mutation of state. But that's not a very useful position to take, because reasoning about, reading and writing code at that low level is too concrete. When I say nondeterministic computation I do not mean PRNGs. I mean "give me all possible solutions to the N-queens problem". I mean "solve this sudoku puzzle with no explicit loop". Constraint solvers. Some classes of search algorithm. Proof systems. That kind of nondeterministic computation. You'll probably respond claiming all this is state. Sure, fine, whatever makes you happy. Everything in programming is state. Everything is also lambda calls. Everything is Horn clauses. You can think about these in some very low level dungeon but that doesn't mean you ought to.