You can randomly issue millions of instructions to a computer.
It is possible that when they are executed, good things will happen, but the odds of that are infinitesimally small.
If you need a computer to do anything that is beyond trivial, then you will need a lot of carefully constructed instructions to make it succeed.
You could try to iterate your way into getting these instructions by experimentation, using trial and error. For all of the earlier iterations just before the final successful one, though, some amount of the included instructions will essentially be random, so as initially stated, the odds that you blunder into the right instructions are tiny.
Instead, even if you are doing some experimentation, you are doing that to build up an internal understanding of how the instructions relate back to the behaviors of the computer. You are building a mental model of how those instructions work.
To be good at programming, you end up having to be good at acquiring this knowledge and using it to quickly build up models. You have to think very carefully about what you are seeing, how it behaves, and what you’d prefer it to have done instead.
These thoughts allow you to build up an understanding that is then manifested as code, which are the instructions given to the computer.
Which is to say that ‘coding’ isn’t the effort, thinking is. Coding is the output from acquiring an understanding of the problem and a possible solution to it. The software is only as good as the thoughts put into it.
If you approach the work too shallowly, then the software will not fit all of the expected behaviours. If the problems to be solved are deep and complex, then the knowledge needed to craft a good solution will also be deep and complex.
We see and acknowledge the value of the existing code, essentially as a form of intellectual property, but we are not properly valuing the knowledge, skills, time, and deep thinking that are necessary to have created such code. Software is only as good as the understanding of the programmers who created it. If they are clueless, the software is close to random. If they only understand a little part of what they are doing, the missing knowledge is getting randomized.
The quality of software is the quality of the thoughts put into it by everyone who contributed to it. If the thinking diminishes over time due to turnover, the quality will follow suit. If the original authors lack the abilities or understanding, the quality will follow suit.
So we can effectively mark out zero quality as being any set of random permutations that maximizes the incorrect behaviors, or bugs, as we like to call them.
But we can also go the other way and say that a very small set of permutations that makes reasonable behavioral tradeoffs while converging very close to zero deficiencies (both in the code itself and in its behavior) is the highest achievable quality. You can only achieve high quality if you’ve taken the time to really understand each and every aspect of what behavior is necessary. The understanding of the authors would have to be nearly full and complete, with no blind spots. That is a huge amount of knowledge, which takes a long time to acquire, and needs a group of people to hold and apply, which is why we don’t see software at that high quality level very often.
We value artwork correctly, though. A particular gifted artist’s work is not the value of the canvas, the frame, and the pigments applied. It is all that went into the artist's life that drove them to express their feelings into a particular painting. The Mona Lisa is a small canvas, but has great value, well beyond its physical presence.
Code is the same way. A talented and super knowledgeable group of people can come together to craft something deep and extremely useful. Its usefulness and value go far beyond the code; it comes from the thoughts that were built up in order to bring it into existence.
When that is forgotten, people stop trying to think deeply, and the quality plummets as a direct result. Thought is valuable, code is just proof that it happened.
