I disagree. What programming is doing is "telling [something] what to do." The difference is that instead of telling people what to do, we are telling inanimate

I disagree. What programming is doing is "telling [something] what to do." The difference is that instead of telling people what to do, we are telling inanimate idiots what to do, and therefore it is not necessarily pleasant, and highly pedantic. The output of a programmer is the output of their mind, not of their muscles. I've stacked boxes in a warehouse and that sort of work is altogether different from telling transistors when to output a high voltage instead of a low voltage, which is fundamentally what we are doing when we are programming.