The fact is, programming at a high level means analyzing thousands of dimensions of information and flattening them out into something executable by a dumb machine.
We are literally expert at becoming experts.
For any given data set there are a number of possible interpretations. Is that notch natural? They say yes, but I'm sure others in the field disagree as well.
"Software engineers often have an unjustified belief that they are intuitive experts in fields in which they have no training or experience."
Including, very frequently, understanding written text.
His claim was that programming is a simple kind of thinking. He gives two representative examples:
* The consideration of sorting algorithms (which in all fairness _is_ a staple in teaching algorithms), and
* The use of simple logic - such is representative of programming language specs.
I'd say that this is a fair summary - real life tends to be a lot more complicated that the problems faced by most programmers.
Even more brutally: he is aiming quite high, a lot of programming is the minor stitching together of APIs without making too big of a mess.
Few programmers ever seriously actually need to analyse thousands of dimensions of information - and I'd say that it is a safe bet that the ones who do are probably using numbers.
To "We are literally expert at becoming experts.", I'd reply with https://xkcd.com/1112/