This strikes me as written by someone who knows a lot more about programming than about writing. The title would be a lot less objectionable, by the way, if it

This strikes me as written by someone who knows a lot more about programming than about writing. The title would be a lot less objectionable, by the way, if it said, "What programming has in common with writing." They're really not much alike. At all. A program is a modular structure, usually hierarchically organized, that sets up highly structured, deterministic processes in a CPU, which in the course of execution develops a run-time flow that is nothing like the original program, and entirely under the programmer's control in principle, creating a tiny but complete causal universe from scratch. Writing is a linear sequence that provokes reactions in a human brain with an entirely different and far more sophisticated instruction set, creating a realtime flow that closely matches the linearity of the original writing while being far more sophisticated and a whole lot less controllable than you thought it was. Most of the complexity is in the brain, rather than the writing - the writing just pulls levers on a far more complex machine. Bicycle riding is a linear sequence of realtime reactive motor outputs that both powers and steers a mechanical aid to travel. On the level where writing and programming are similar to each other, they're about equally similar to bicycle riding.