> The core of programming is truly figuring out the problem you're solving. Everything else is management of complexity. The second point is equally important,

> The core of programming is truly figuring out the problem you're solving. Everything else is management of complexity. The second point is equally important, as you already said in "structuring and compressing that description". The core of programming is try figuring out the problem (in your mind) and then serializing your thoughts in a way that both the computer _and_ other humans (or you yourself a year later) can easily understand. The latter obviously is irrelevant if you write the code once, run it a few times and then throw it away, but we all know that most problems occur because this does not happen too often.