As a non-technical person with just a basic ability to program I would still agree with you - basic programming is only "hard" in the sense that the grammar of

As a non-technical person with just a basic ability to program I would still agree with you - basic programming is only "hard" in the sense that the grammar of languages like French or German is "hard" - maybe the better word would be tedious? Take a very basic task like "Apply this text replacement to all .txt files in this folder and all subfolders". If you are a beginner programmer for example in Python, you have to search for the module and get a basic understanding of how it works. While you never run into any conceptual difficulty, this can still take you a lot of time and you will make strange errors along the way.