Nice article! After reading the title, a lot of anologies rushed into my mind. You have pretty much mentioned most of them (chef, playing guitar , writing) . I agree that programming is not hard, as you have already mentioned, since the statement itself is vague due to its over generalisation . And it depends (like most jobs in the world) on the task a person is doing, the tools his is using , his own aptitude and prior knowledge and much more.

I would rather extend your propsotion that programming is an emotion tiggering activity (same as almost all human jobs). And frustration is not the only emotion it triggers. Take virtually every human emotion (joy, anger, boredom, awe etc ) and one can protentially come up with articles like: "Programming is joyful", "Programming is awefull" etc having myself felt many of them during my 18+ years of writing code. (There were times when I actually even felt claustrophobic and suffocated while writng some complex code)

I suppose people classify programming as hard is since programming can trigger negative emotions lot of the time and yet they want to pursue it. There is a quote from Ouspensky: "The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them" . Applies to almost every human endeavours involving the brain in addtion to programming.