> Programming, even systems engineering, is a surprisingly shallow field.

I agree, and I don't think we should be at all ashamed of this.

The beauty of programming is that we can produce incredibly complex and powerful things by manipulating a small set of simple constructs together. There are only a few core tools--iteration, conditionals, etc.--but they can be snapped together into much more capable configurations.

Good programming is the art of deconstructing complex behaviour into these few constructs, and that's really fascinating.