[gonzalohm]

I think it's safe to say that computing should be mostly deterministic. I know compilers use heuristics that are stochastic, but come on. Imagine if you were given a layer of abstraction that randomly flipped bits from time to time... That's not an abstraction, it's random programming.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Imagine if you were given a layer of abstraction that randomly flipped bits from time to time

To be fair, this isn’t a bad description of human vision.

[zild3d]

> Imagine if you were given a layer of abstraction that randomly flipped bits from time to time... That's not an abstraction, it's random programming.

Computing has never really been deterministic all the way down. Storage gets corrupted, RAM has soft errors, networks drop/reorder packets, schedulers race, caches go stale, distributed systems partition, query planners change plans, ...

Obviously those become tolerable because we've developed layers of contracts and understanding the bounds around them. Error correcting codes, checksums, retries, consensus, idempotency, false-positive rates, SLAs, etc.

If the abstraction is “delegate this task to a junior engineer, analyst, lawyer, designer, or support rep,” you dont expect deterministic behavior. There's review, constraints, escalation, checklists, tests, and accountability.