"The net effect of which is to make "programming" an exercise in (a) wanting to do something, (b) realizing that someone's probably done it before, (c) looking up what they did, and (d) tweaking it a little bit. As I tweak I begin to understand, and to become less a user of all this wonderful mess than a contributor to it."
I wouldn't say that's what programming is. I would say that's a good way to just create something simple. A thoughtful understanding of the entire stack is necessary to create a solid base, but given the fact many people just wan't something quick his approach should be fine.
You're second quote is horribly out of context. Turing says using a survey to describe machines as thinking beings in the commonly used sense of the words is absurd, not the question of "Can a machine think?".