[_delirium]

I'd strongly disagree with that. I'd argue: it's rarely a normative process, and can (and should!) be made less normative. In fact, almost the only times it can be considered close to normative are when it's in a huge organization banging out boilerplate code, because in that case you've already assumed a fixed structure and placed "programming" into a niche within it, and declared that the structure isn't currently up for reevaluation.

But I don't think that fundamentally you can separate the act of expressing programs from the act of coming up with interesting things for them to do. The materials of the medium constrain what is possible or easy to express, and it's quite hard to produce anything good if you try to artificially separate them into levels of specification vs. implementation.