However if I then show you a programming language, a database engine (similar in capability to SQL but around 1000x faster), a graphical desktop with icons, mouse, editors, filesystems, ISR, and so on- and it's still under 400 lines of C code, then maybe it's easier to have this conversation that I think we need to have: That maybe all you programmers have simply been doing it wrong, and there's something fundamentally wrong with the way you and everyone else programs computers.
I think most programmers take so much offence from the thesis: that everyone programs wrongly (or badly) and that a fundamental shift in the way we program could make programming much better, that it's been difficult to actually work on this problem. Just look at all the people who are complaining about the text editor being difficult to read without saying I can't read this, and I want to get better.
And I think it should be obvious: You've built bridges for thousands of years, so you expect you're pretty good at it now, and yet there are still improvements in bridgemaking today; why do you expect programming to be any different? Why do you have "best practices" for programming if you've only been doing it for a few decades and don't really know how to do it yet?
Maybe it's much easier to think we're working on giving non-programmers the ability to program, but we're not: we're trying to make programming suck less.