By the way, claiming a statement is vague is quite disingenuous if you take the quote out of context. Especially when the author explains what they mean in the next four sentences:

Programming today is exactly what you’d expect to get by paying an isolated subculture of nerdy young men to entertain themselves for fifty years. You get a cross between Dungeons & Dragons and Rubik’s Cube, elaborated a thousand-fold. I’m serious: Dungeons & Dragons requires mastery of an encyclopedia of minutiae; Rubik’s Cube is a puzzle requiring abstract mathematical thinking. That is programming in a nutshell. As a bonus you also get a toxic culture of intellectual one-up.