This is absurd, in a variety of ways. If you reduce programming to a process, the same can be said of the formation of language itself. Both are combinations of symbols in a pattern percieved to have some type of meaning from an external point of view, with infinite expressability. At some level, the differences disappear; the only way you could ever believe that coding is a process is if you hold that creativity itself is also a process (albeit a complex one) carried out in our brains. Granted, not all code is creative, but not all sentences are poetic either. And if coding is devoid of creativity, I'd be interested to see you code something up that can follow the process on its own and put us all out of a job.
Incidently, I had Touretzky as a professor last semester for a neural nets class, he's a cool man. And he wasn't bullshitting for the sake of winning a case; it seemed to be fairly obvious to me from hearing him lecture that he really does feel his work goes beyond applying "the process" and churning out new algorithms & programs for his work [simulating rat brains, interestingly enough].
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Incidently, I had Touretzky as a professor last semester for a neural nets class, he's a cool man. And he wasn't bullshitting for the sake of winning a case; it seemed to be fairly obvious to me from hearing him lecture that he really does feel his work goes beyond applying "the process" and churning out new algorithms & programs for his work [simulating rat brains, interestingly enough].