Programming (noun): The art of putting together software that other people have written and breaking it in new and exciting ways.

It’s rare that you will have to create something entirely new from scratch.  So, it’s always a matter of taking things that have already been made and putting them together.

Conceptually, this a pretty simple idea.  In practice however, it’s much more complicated.  You need to know how exactly all the parts come together.  This is why good documentation of libraries is very important.  Without good documentation, it’s next to impossible to integrate a needed library.  You almost have to become an expert in how the library works, which rather defeats the purpose of using a library in the first place! This is very annoying.  Please, write good documentation!

Also, it seems that ‘programming’ could be both a noun and a verb, but Webster’s only defines it as a noun.  Seems like a bit of an oversight.