[Jensson]

> One can look at the source code to a program, the libraries it uses, the compiler for the language, and the ISA spec for the machine language the compiler generates. You can know that there are no hidden unspecified quantities because programs can't work without being specified.

I doubt you actually can do that and understand it all. A computer can do it, but I doubt you the human can do that and get a perfect picture of any non trivial program without making errors. Human math is a human language first and foremost, its grammar is human language which is used to define things and symbols. This lets us write things that humans can actually read and understand the entirety of, unlike a million lines of code or cpu instructions.

Show me a program written by 10 programmers over 10 years and I doubt anyone really understands all of it. But we have mathematical fields that hundreds of mathematicians have written over centuries, and people still are able to understand it all perfectly. It is true that a computer can easily read a computer program, but since we are arguing about teaching humans you would need to show evidence that humans can actually read and understand complex code well.