Comment by makeitdouble

> It is quite believable that it's easier to describe what a program should result in versus actually programming it to produce that result

This is obvious for the central cases of a program. It becomes less and less true when going toward the edge cases, especially for a wide array of input.

Complex specs becoming programs is IMHO the direct effect of that (defining what we want is just that burdensome, and special cases we haven't though of will still have a coherent definition in the spec), and we fall back to the base "is this spec even correct" issue the parent points out.