[mjburgess]

Programming is always a modelling of real-world process. If you want to program directly for the CPU, it is this device which provides you with operation primitives which you sequence. Perhaps you mean you'd prefer to model more interesting processes.

But if you mean algorithm design, that isn't programming. Algorithms arent programs, and the "operations" that they "sequence" are abstract. CSCi alg. design is more like geometry.

Programming is an empirical discipline; it uses the "geometry" of csci to build applications.

[hsn915]

Programming is almost never about modelling a real world process - unless you're doing some kind of physics simulation.

Programming is mainly about data transformations.

[mjburgess]

All "real world" here means is that the program's semantics are correct given empirical conditions. Here, since "data" just means columns which are measures of the world, the program is modelling a real-world process.

Contrast that with algorithms whose semantics are abstract and are correct given essentially mathematical laws, rather than empirical conditions.