A Techie here - I think, for example, literature is none of these. Every time I read Graham Greene, there are these terse sentences which leave me with admiration for his observation into human nature, and his masterly sardonic sarcasm - e.g. "I am easily moved to anger by cruelties not mine own" [ A Sort of Life ], or when describing how assurance in youth ends in doubts later "even our handwriting begins young and takes on the tired arabesques of time" [ The End of the Affair ], the sentences stay in your memory long after you've read them, and you see that pithy phrases can carry a world of experience behind them. Another great sentence - "We live as we dream - alone" [Conrad, Heart of Darkness]
Literature may be considered boring because it takes patience to appreciate, but I think it is neither primitive nor plain. If some programming reaches the level of art, as in a clever hack, maybe we can tell others about the beauty of the solution. (G. H. Hardy says that "Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not". At least history has not borne this out - people do find literature easily more beautiful than they do theorems and programs.)
Literature may be considered boring because it takes patience to appreciate, but I think it is neither primitive nor plain. If some programming reaches the level of art, as in a clever hack, maybe we can tell others about the beauty of the solution. (G. H. Hardy says that "Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not". At least history has not borne this out - people do find literature easily more beautiful than they do theorems and programs.)