[gdp]

I agree that computing as an activity has manifestations that could be understood to be art, but that doesn't make _programming_ art. Glorifying programming as an art is like glorifying spelling as salient to the quality of Shakespeare's plays. Programming is the act of expressing programs. Coming up with interesting things for those programs to do definitely follows a creative process of human inspiration, but actually writing those programs down is not an "art". It's a fairly normative process in most cases, and it can (and should!) be made more normative.

[_delirium]

I'd strongly disagree with that. I'd argue: it's rarely a normative process, and can (and should!) be made less normative. In fact, almost the only times it can be considered close to normative are when it's in a huge organization banging out boilerplate code, because in that case you've already assumed a fixed structure and placed "programming" into a niche within it, and declared that the structure isn't currently up for reevaluation.

But I don't think that fundamentally you can separate the act of expressing programs from the act of coming up with interesting things for them to do. The materials of the medium constrain what is possible or easy to express, and it's quite hard to produce anything good if you try to artificially separate them into levels of specification vs. implementation.

[jimbokun]

I feel that you are going Humpty Dumpty on us, picking a meaning for "programming" that makes your point but is far a field of what the term "programming" means in the minds of practitioners.

Basically, you have defined programming as a form of dictation. That definition makes your arguments true. But it does not follow the common usage of this term, especially as a site like this.