A lot of modern coding does involve programming. But it is more concerned with storage and transmission of information. Like how to reduce the symbols (in info theory parlance) required for representing information (by eliminating information redundancy), how to increase the error recovery capability of a message (by adding some information redundancy), etc. Applications include transmission encoding/decoding dats (eg: DVB-S, Trellis code), error detection and correction (eg: CRC32, FEC), lossless compression (eg: RLE, LZW), lossy compression (most audio and video formats), etc.
As you may have already figured out, it's applications are in digital communication systems, file and wire formats for various types of data, data storage systems and filesystems, compression algorithms, as part of cryptographic protocols and data formats, various types of codecs, etc.