It's not about being a dick and discouraging people who want to learn programming but they should know in what they are getting into: programming is hard and the learning process is a long road of many years.
It's important to distinguish being a programmer at all and being a very good programmer.
Even Norvig (condescendingly) concedes that idiot dummies can become bad programmers. The point he misses, is what Jacques refers to a brain amplification and Excel programming: even a bad programmer can reap significant benefits from programming.
My favourite consulting gig, about ten years ago now, was for some friends of a friend. They were not very technical, most of them history graduates, who'd taught themselves just enough PHP to cobble together an online history text book in an open source CMS - and sold it to a bunch of schools, and their server was now positively on fire. I helped them move to a bigger server, and migrate their search from the CMS' awful MySQL based homebrew to Solr, and they lived to fight another day.
Norvig can call them idiot dummies from his ivory tower all day long, but these guys created a business from nothing, and it's still around today.
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years http://norvig.com/21-days.html
with that wonderful quote "Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies."