> an Asperger profession
could you, please, elaborate on this meme?
And that pyramid, well, it definitely is the way how a corporate and enterprise Java software has been and still being made. Java itself is an ecosystem for creating coding factories - to parallelize the process of coding (one cannot honestly call this programming) among teams of easily replaceable, uniform (in terms of abilities) cheap workers. Every manager will tell about this ideal.
For programming look at PAIP or the lisp code supplement to AIMA - this is programming. Take a look at Plan9 - this is programming. People who have created Erlang were engaged in programming. Code that runs Google's AI is programming. This is an art, same as writing poetry, composition of music, writing symphonies or complex novels.
But there are very few slots available, because demand for programming is very low - it is still difficult and very expensive. Conveyor belt coding, on the other hand, is indeed fits the Kay's pyramid metaphor. And the result of such process is crap - everyone have seen "enterprise code" made by such sweat shops..
The crucial difference between an art and merely piling up more crap is that art means an attempts to approach an ideal, an optimum, perfection - it is, ideally, a reduction process with eventually converges to the closest possible approximation to an ideal. Something like this:
[] ++ ys = ys
(x:xs) ++ ys = x : xs ++ ys
While in the in the second case is just a process of production. Not in the sense of Japanese perfection of every move and detail, but in the sense a hipster produces yet another narcissistic blog post.
BTW, Asperger is this. And it is not that bad.)