The act or programming is comparable to writing or simple arithmetic.
I have interviewed many people who claim to know programming, but can't program. These same people I think could read and do simple arithmetic.
Like many things, once you know how to do it, it looks easy. I never understood why people have a hard time with pointers, recursion or dependency injection, but many people do. Programming is not some impossible to learn skill, but it does require dedication, a level of abstract thinking not often found in other disciplines, and logic. Reducing programming to writing or arithmetic is maybe true for simple Excel macros, but not what most people on this site would consider programming.
Is the 8 year old doing Scratch exercises not programming? I would claim she is. The difference we want to make then, is between 'simple' programming and complex systems level programming.
I claim both can provide value. Even simple programming can be used to automate domain specific tasks that will reduce the amount of manual labour required, freeing the professional to other tasks and thus increase their productivity.
Programming in a professional setting has thus at least two facets - a tool to create new systems and a tool to automate existing ones. I would claim both tasks are programming but with dramatically different mechanisms for adding value.
"Reducing programming to writing or arithmetic is maybe true for simple Excel macros, but not what most people on this site would consider programming."
Yeah, I went overboard with simplification there. The difference I wanted to communicate (but failed) was between the human requirements for entry level scripting and actual systems programming as the post I responded to stated programming did not have the same economies of scarcity as skills in medicine. I would have been more correct to state that programming is more like arithmetic than medicine in the sense that both novice and experts alike can provide added value through the act of programming but in widely different circumstances.
I'm a professional software engineer but my wife with a PhD in physics 'just happens' to write Matlab scripts in her day job as an R&D engineer to chew through terabytes of production data in an indusrial setting so I think I have a pretty good view to these different kinds of domains :)
I think a lot of what we call simple programming today will just be expected knowledge for most people in a short amount of time. Doing Scratch exercises or writing a macro will not make me a future person a programmer in the same way doing some simple math does not make me today a mathematician.
I have interviewed many people who claim to know programming, but can't program. These same people I think could read and do simple arithmetic.
Like many things, once you know how to do it, it looks easy. I never understood why people have a hard time with pointers, recursion or dependency injection, but many people do. Programming is not some impossible to learn skill, but it does require dedication, a level of abstract thinking not often found in other disciplines, and logic. Reducing programming to writing or arithmetic is maybe true for simple Excel macros, but not what most people on this site would consider programming.