This is a good discussion: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchai...
I disagree. The code must also refer to the implementation of the Ethereum clients, and the collective will of the network participants. Those are implicit provisions of the contract, specified in advance. The Ethereum Classic chain still exists, and the thief is welcome to use it. People have simply voted with their feet and prefer a world without the theft. There is no breach of contract, anyone is free to fork the Ethereum network in any way, at any time. It is up to the users to decide how much value to ascribe each fork.
If the premise is "the code is the contract, period, except we reserve the right to change the contract at any time or even to cause the contract retroactively never to have existed, based on implicit or subjective factors decided by humans and not by code", then it's a very different beast.
There's no way of framing this that preserves the philosophical purity.
It's the same thing with Communism/Socialism. Communism is the pure end state, utopia, etc.
Socialism is the ugly road there.
Now, of course we know Socialism usually does a 5 minute walk in the park then turns 90 degree at that big pine tree, and when no one's watching puts on the evil hat, and by the end of the hour it's a totalitarian state! No iteration on ideas, criticism is met with GULAG, no education, teachers and thinkers are decadent freeloaders, enemies of Communism, internment, execution, mass murder! You know the drill.
Etherum and other code is law experiments are trying to find the best expression of that "common sense" platform, they are trying to craft the best Constitution for this. "And no true Scotsman claimed that Etherum/DAO is perfect." (This is the part where semantics is fuzzy, as it really depends on who said what, when, how, why, and to whom. But realistically, anyone who claimed to get it right the first time, was too optimistic, and of course, it was "reviewed", http://piratepad.net/theDAOreview [ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4hkgsz/a_summary_... ] and see .. but never audited - https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ota1q/the_truth_... .)
Given the number of people involved, it could even be juged as organized crime against one person...
Instead, as others have pointed out, the hard fork demonstrated that this was not at all the case. Ethereum contracts can be voided, and the entire premise is therefore flawed. Terms and conditions would just be another way that contracts could be voided, another flaw.
All the use cases I've seen depend on external input to be even moderately useful. But once you depend on unverifiable and potentially fraudulent external input, the supposed unique value of these scripts is lost. The notion of "oracles" just moves the problem elsewhere so it can be dismissed.
When and if we see profitable uses of these block-chain scripts then I would be glad to revisit this assessment. Until then it looks to me like a classic case of a technology looking for a problem.