[resu_nimda]

I think of programming as most similar to writing. This may be more true of userland application development than things that are more purely mathematical or low-level. But even then there are parallels. At the end of the day you are creating a work of written language, where "humanistic" decisions beyond the raw formulas shape how the work is understood and interacted with (e.g. symbol/variable/file names, or how the code is broken up [or not] into modules/subroutines).

A programmer getting started contributing to a large existing codebase may feel more like a proofreader or editor at first. But creating an application from scratch definitely seems very similar to writing a novel.