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The question to be settled is whether any finite list can predict outcomes. Is DNA a blueprint, and can entirely novel organisms be designed.

This is an empirical question, but an unsettled one.

My skepticism is based on experience with software design. With computers you have an environment in which every possible instruction has a completely defined effect. Yet it is difficult to design software that is reliable. Even worse, it isn't possible with the current state of technology to automatically translate a program from one delelopment language to another, or automatically port a software system from one Operating System or CPU to another. These tasks all involve finite lists of operations, but are too complex to automate.

I'm not convinced that it is possible to predict all the interactions that occur when DNA is "decoded".

It has been more than a century since Darwin -- who had no concept of genetics or DNA -- and the best gusee as to how life works is still variation+overproduction+selection. This is a pretty sloppy way for a computer program to operate, hence I maintain there is a fundamental difference between DNA and current computer programs.

I agree, and as you allude to, the interesting question is whether DNA can be considered a finite-state machine. My guess is that it probably is for a genome of a given length, albeit one with a whole sh*tload of potential states. But since there's no upper-bound for the length of a genome that I know of, the potential states for genomes generally are, thus far, infinite.

In any case, the most interesting states - the ones not currently well-understood, anyway - are a result of the tertiary and quaternary structures formed under various conditions. It's just my guess, but I'd bet that there will turn out to be a finite number of functional states, in terms of tertiary and quaternary structures, for a given genome.