First, is the fact that we need to tell the computer what to do. This is, I think, what the author thinks of "programming" as. He's right, it's hard, and it's gotten easier as we've improved our tools and languages that enable us to tell the machine what we want it to do.
However, second, is the problem of taking a description of a problem, from another human, and translating it into a piece of software. The source of this information, in the worst case, is a verbal description. At the extreme, it's a written specification (which, as we all know, ultimately ends up in the trash.)
It's this knowledge capture problem that I think has a wide open opportunity. There needs to be a better way for the 3rd party humans to describe their problems in a way programmers can build on top of. It doesn't have to be precise, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the status quo of verbal descriptions and .doc files of specs.