Yeah, that's why I spend 16 hour days coding in Common Lisp and Mozart/Oz.
"If programmers liked to code, every last one of us would be overjoyed to write our own HTTP client."
Because HTTP clients are a stupid display oriented and bug-tolerant little things. HTTP SERVERS on the other hand, those are more tractable, since you can be responsible for following the specs yourself, and a treat to work with for all the interesting engineering possibilities they offer, which is why more people have written web servers than web clients.
“I just want to update this field in this file, why do I have to write an XML parser?”
Oh, he is talking about that programmer: the corporate data janitor. That sentence is just laden with idiocy; first, if your data is in xml and you don't have established tools to perform "CRUD" type operations on your XML files, you're doing XML wrong (lack of established process). Second, if you have to write an XML parser to edit an entity in a file, you're doing it wrong (refusal to use established tools, NIH). Third, if someone has to enlighten you on how to update one of your data files (inability to RTFM) .. Dear Neo, the salve of Hackingkind, you're doing it wrong. No wonder you hate programming then.