It's all those things and the ability to see how very small parts form to create a larger thing.
Or in the words of Donald Knuth: "the psychological profiling [of a good programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large."
Note that he doesn't necessarily mean "low level" as in "machine code and system calls" just smaller parts of a system.
Re:On why learning to program is hard
by SAI_Peregrinus on Saturday April 26, 2014 @08:08PM
(#7653265)
One of my favorite programming tutorials is "Write Yourself A Scheme." It's not "Here's the language, here's the API, etc" it's "Let's accomplish this task. Here's some documentation. Here's a breakdown of what you need to do. Figure out how to do it." There's no answer key to the exercises, either your solution worked or you need to redo it.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_...
It's also an eco-system. Libraries, learning how to find things that others have done. It's what your program is connected to, how to interface with other devices and things written in other languages, (and so on.)
Most tutorial books I've read are tours of the standard library functions that the author uses regularly. Perhaps communicated via toy programs, perhaps not. If that's the interface people are initially presented with, (and I'd be amazed if that's not most people's experience of Learn To Program tutorial books,) then of course programming is going to be hard to get into.