[Xyzodiac]

Really not the same thing. You could produce the same C++ program in Notepad that you could in any other editor or IDE. Here the artist is working with restricted tools in a way that the restriction becomes part of the work itself

[mattigames]

Not really, there are a few people in the world that CAN create an image pixel by pixel using MS paint and make it look like a photo (the top people on hyper-realism) and get the very same result they would get using Photoshop, just taking tons of more time.

And even if the "restricted tools" do make a difference we are splitting hairs here, because we can create a similar equivalence, e.g. a c++ program with artificial restrictions: A program where you can't use your own classes or structs, or a program that can't be bigger than 1KB, and so on.

[digaozao]

As an intern in a Google training program in Brazil, they gave us the project to make a crawler, without any c++ libs other than curl.

It was difficult, but we really learned a lot.