Displaying <? echo "hello world;" ?> is programming, doing some Excel thingies is programming, heck, even doing a
> print 'test'
inside the Python REPL is programming, all this is not that complicated The only issue is that we've stopped calling that sort of stuff "programming", we've started moving the goalposts more and more, and then of course "programming" has become harder and harder: if you don't write tests you're not programming, if you don't to TDD you're not programming, if you're not ready for pair-programming you're not programming, if you're not writing everything inside a container you're not programming etc.
That's a bit of a crude reduction, in my opinion. If we are debating semantics, then I would argue that I'm a part-time surgeon because I removed a splinter. I would do more surgery if it wasn't for all the civil engineering I've been getting up to in the garden lately.
Sure, surgeons and engineers have to start somewhere just like programmers. But they also have well-defined gates to make sure true imposters don't get in.
Being a surgeon is not the same thing as being an engineer, being an engineer is not the same thing as being a programmer. The post was about being a programmer, i.e. about making computers “automatically” do the stuff that you want them to do.
> print 'test'
inside the Python REPL is programming, all this is not that complicated The only issue is that we've stopped calling that sort of stuff "programming", we've started moving the goalposts more and more, and then of course "programming" has become harder and harder: if you don't write tests you're not programming, if you don't to TDD you're not programming, if you're not ready for pair-programming you're not programming, if you're not writing everything inside a container you're not programming etc.