Speaking directly to Joes' comment about, "new capabilities in modern cameras that we didn't have in the film era and they really can make a difference" Here's one take (mine) on why the old-school way of "dissing programmed" makes little sense today, in 2016.
Modern Nikon cameras have 14 to 14.6 EV of scene DR that can be handled pretty well. With banks of 100,000-plus actual real photos, and metering systems that break the scene down into 2,016 parts on cheaper cameras, to tens of thousands of segments on higher end cameras, and with Date and Time and Location entered into the camera at Set-Up, the program can know things like, "Set to Daylight WB..hmmm..Seattle, Washington....November 27th...1:34 in the afternoon...hmmmm....10 light areas amongst 25 gray areas...hmmm. Overcast with slight cloud cover breaks....lower 4/5 of frame 7.5 EV darker than top 1/5...okay. GOT the right exposure!" Similarly, San Diego,California, July 4, 1:34 PM....meter analyzes a BRILLIANT orb, taking up 1/150th of the frame, upper left corner, upper 4/5 of frame show blue colors, bottom shows a steady, sandy-colored tone....OMG...'we're at the beach!"...in side-lighting, set Tone Curve to LOW to handle contrast, exposure NAILED!"
Midnight, San Diego, July 20th, 1:45 A.M.,15 tiny, tiny 3,458 degrees Kelvin, illuminated light spots against a mosly dark field....Oh! We're in a darkened parking lot, and the camera location is San Diego, CA, and we know the date, the SUN CAN NOT BE anywhere...This is a night-time exposure....
This is partly how Programmed exposure works nowadays: the camera has 100,000 to 200,000 ACTUAL photos, broken down into exposure levels, exposure comparisons,total brightness ranges, preponderance of brightness values, outlier values, and 3-D, color-aware, distance-aware, reflectance-aware metering "patterns". Back light, side-light, front light, night-time, low-light, early AM, late PM, full night-time....low-contrast lighting, high-contrast lighting, these things are all, now, today, integrated. Nikon INVENTED the Matrix metering system with scene analysis in the Nikon FA camera, back in the mid-1980's. Now, every camera maker has copied the idea of 100,000-plus scenes, reduced to Patterns, and then classified and analyzed with a computer microchip. THIS IS WHY Programmed shiftable Automatic metering works so well in modern, digital cameras...especially with 14-stop scene dynamic range capabilities.
Many old-school thinkers view exposure metering as if it were 1963; "Oh, I need to compensate for the reflectane value, bcause this is White, so I need to Open Up 2 Stops!" NOPE--the cameras are now shooting color positive, and the metering can read the color of an object, and can adjust the exposure needed to render it properly as a color POSITIVE image, and NOT as a B&W negative image! Slides and negatives are metered very differently. Cameras now are loaded with their own brand and type of "film".
We have a lot of people trying to pigeonhole camera metering and exposure into outdated ways of thinking and making decisions. Old-school reflected light metering for negative films is not the same as metering for color positive pictures. Programmed systems in 2016 cameras are vaaaaaaastly smarter than they were in a 1978 Canon AE-1 Program shooting Kodacolor 200 negative film. Keep in mind: we are now shooting, digitally, with 1) ONE film type, color positive and 2) With variable Tone Curve (Plus-Development, Normal Development, or Minus Development!) and 3) Variable color saturation and so on and so on. and 4) Color-sensing and reflectance-computing exposure meters.