> You're not the only one - I also hated some of the things you've said about programming; I couldn't help it, programming is a large part of my identity, so I got defensive really fast.

Also, although I'm saying that learning programming is relatively easy, it is a field that is hard to master. The difficulty isn't understanding what a function does, but understanding how to architect a huge complex system so that you can still reason about it afterwards. Those systems will all be made up of those simple instructions though. That is different from math, in math the systems you invent often are entirely new things and can't get divided into simpler things.