As much as programming required the same code over and over, there's still a whole lot of thinking that needs to be applied - at the core, there's the need to think like a computer just to solve the problem itself; on top of that there's a layer of understanding required to debug to make it more than just bruteforcong; and then there's a layer of understanding the fundamentals of the underlying architecture in order to be able to reason how to solve a problem in a fast, reliable, and efficient way. While a traditional programming class can teach how to write code, and maybe even how to solve basic problems on your own, a few short programming tutorials isn't enough to get most people into the right mind-set to go on learning the rest on their own, nor is it usually enough for them to be able to go out and write a full program from scratch.