It's not the programming is easy, it's that it has a low barrier to entry. Things like law and medicine have really high (one could say artificial) barriers to

It's not the programming is easy, it's that it has a low barrier to entry. Things like law and medicine have really high (one could say artificial) barriers to entry. High school biology wasn't very hard, and I imagine you could be minimally useful after little more than that. But to actually become a doctor is a very different matter. Just like being a Java jockey is very different from working on high-performance distributed systems.