Determinism

Full Title or Meme

The doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by prior events and conditions together with the laws of nature,

Context

In 1976 Niklaus Wirth appears to make the statement that computer programs could be understood with the follow statement:

In recent years the practice of Computer Programming has been recognized as a discipline

Problem

Alan Turing had proven that the full progress of a program cannot, in general, be known without actually running the program. While all computer scientists have learned Turing's theorem, it does not appear that the understood how some its limitations would apply to the every day work of computer programmers. That day has certainly arrived.

Solution

If the course of a computer program cannot be known in advance, it is irrelevant to the way that humans lead their lives in the current world as we cannot, in theory, know the results of any complex device that we may build in the future. That is not a statement that in any way should limit the responsibility of the programmers from their responsibility to society, even though their own code of Ethics refuses to articulate that ultimate responsibility.