Give it 200 years and programming will probably be thought of as accounting. Well paid and nessisarily, but hardly revolutionary.
PS: Salaries have generally stagnated over the last 10 years suggesting supply and demand are well matched. Their is a lot of stratification, but most programmers make well under six figures.
I don't think we can ever standardize programming any more than we can standardize humanity's collective goals and ambitions.
Plumbers still need to get things to work in your house, but tools and techniques have largely removed guesswork. The end point will be different than accounting, but I feel the trend is clear with knowledge replacing the need for extreme generic problem solving skills.
‘Design Patterns’ are of real though limited value, that’s a meta example of exactly what I am talking about.
Programmers should be making closer to 200-300k per year; but then everyone else would be making 30 or 40 dollars an hour minimum wage.
Supply and demand aren’t well matched, considering the job posting out there. But there’s a lot going on influencing all of this
As for not hard--I don't know. We have an unusually high paying career, which companies do not do out of the generosity of their hearts. They have a limited supply of people that can do it. Quite a few people show no aptitude at all. At the high end, it merges into pure computer science, with an essentially unlimited amount to know. So, you can draw badly, or become a professional artist. Certainly, a person can program badly, but I don't think you can call it "not hard" any more than you can call anything else "not hard".
I wouldn't, and don't, romanticize it. It often just sucks. And programmers can often come with pointless, inflated egos from some view that they do something special, and I would like to see a check on that and those pointless egos deflated. But "not eating the world" and "not hard" don't really check out, from my perspective.