[gingerBill]

Author of the article here:

I completely agree that the essence of a "program" is transforming data. In my previous article which I linked to in the main article, I specifically state "The purpose of a program is, and ought to be, something that transforms data into other forms of data".

But the essence of "programming" is different, and I stand by statement that "Programming is a tool to solve problems that you have in the domain of computers". And this article was an extension of the previous article meaning that taking it out of context has caused this confusion. But the term "programming" embeds the concept of "a program" already: programming produces a program. Programming does not start with hitting the computer with a baseball bat.

[BerislavLopac]

I've argued for a long time that everything in programming comes down to:

1. Data. It can be in many different forms and structures, more or less strictly typed, and a big part of writing a program is determining what it looks like, and what it should look like.

2. Procedures to work on that data. They can transform the data, remove it, reshape it, convert it, or do any number of other operations on it, simple or complex.

That's all there is to programming.