What I think he means is that when you program, you take terms that has specific meanings (in whatever abstract machine the compiler/interpreter embodies) and arrange them according to the rules in order to describe the steps of a solution so that the machine can solve it automatically. The syntax are not that actually important, you can compose new terms from basic terms and create a language that way. You abstract that way, expanding or reducing the vocabulary you have to work with, finding some specific relations between the term that facilitates describing (paradigms). Syntax is important because the machine only understand those specific terms arranged in those specific ways. It just that the set of problem it can solve is very large, the solutions more so, and your program is just only one element. Solving the problem is not programming, restricting it to what the machine can do is. And for that syntax is what you got, because that's what the machine accept.
The correct analogy here is grammar, not spelling.
Someone who hasn't mastered the written grammar of the language in which they wish to write a novel, is unlikely to produce anything someone else would want to read.
Prerequisite, yes, but it is not the thing itself. Just because you can spell doesn't mean you can write a novel, or every Spelling Bee winner should become an award winning novelist. The meaning of the words, the structure of the novel, characterizations, etc. all matter as well, and are ultimately much more important than just spelling things correctly.
Defining programming as just syntax is nonsense. The SHOUTED IS (like we're on AOL again for some reason) places outsized emphasis on syntax. Either that it is "just syntax" as randomdata wrote or the majority of programming as the SHOUTED IS could also imply, makes no sense. Just creating a syntactically valid program is insufficient for creating a correct or useful program, just as correctly spelling a string of words is not enough to create a novel.
“This program, print the numbers from 1 to 10 in python”
In order to run my simple program just copy paste it into your LLM, of choice and execute it
Notice that the program does what it supposed to do it is deterministic unless you use something like gpt2 and it solves the problem that I aim to solve