Author of the article here:

I completely agree that the essence of a "program" is transforming data. In my previous article which I linked to in the main article, I specifically state "The purpose of a program is, and ought to be, something that transforms data into other forms of data".

But the essence of "programming" is different, and I stand by statement that "Programming is a tool to solve problems that you have in the domain of computers". And this article was an extension of the previous article meaning that taking it out of context has caused this confusion. But the term "programming" embeds the concept of "a program" already: programming produces a program. Programming does not start with hitting the computer with a baseball bat.