Programming

What has happened to the perception of programming being a science, an engineering discipline, or even art? Today’s students seem to think programming is nothing but copying code snippets from some dodgy sources, renaming variables (if they can even be bothered with that) and hoping that by magic this conglomeration of code odds and ends will produce the desired result. This approach is certainly not science or engineering. One might see an artistic spirit in it, but to me it mostly resembles guessing, gambling, and hoping that the parser will highlight & correct some syntax errors … and when the code compiles it surely has to be correct.