The word programmer covers a stupendously large spectrum of abilities and skill levels. On a vertical axis, a programmer could barely know how to use vbscript, or they could be writing compilers for Intel and developing scientific computation software for aviation companies. On a horizontal axis, they could be experts on databases, or weeding performance out of a GPU, or building concurrent processing libraries, or making physics engines, or doing image processing, or generating 3D models, or writing printer drivers, or using coffeescript, HTML5 and AJAX to build web apps, or using nginx and PHP for writing the LAMP stack the web app is sitting on, or maybe they write networking libraries or do artificial intelligence research. They are all programmers.