I find it interesting that the two examples he gives of "proper professions" are highly regulated guild-like professions whose values are artificially inflated, at least to some degree.

I'm only a very new programmer, but I'm reading Martin Fowler's Refactoring and, even from my limited experience I'm finding that one of the differences between software and other products is that software must be maintainable. So the end user isn't the only end user. Software has to be read and worked on by other programmers in future, and most of the craft involved is not in making a program simply work as it's supposed to, but making the code easy to read, easy to maintain, and easy to modify.

So the aesthetic quality of the code and the craftsmanship involved is very important, for pragmatic and eventually end-user-facing reasons.

But hey, what do I know? I haven't gone to programmer's school or gotten a programmer's license or anything.