Although there is no mentioning of any references, I have a clue that it is a response to "Don't call yourself a programmer" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3170766)
But at the end of the day it's not strictly about semantics, I think it's also about how you understand you work. When I don't introduce myself as an entrepreneur, I always introduce myself as a software engineer. Not out of elitism or anything like that, but because I think it carries more the fact that I am here to solve problems, and that programming is just one possible mean to this end.