‘programming is the art of creating machines simply by describing them.’

it’s the closest thing to ‘spell-casting magic’ I’ll ever know, it finds ways to stay fresh

If coding is the purest form of art, then lambda calculus may be the purest form of code. Its graphical representation [1] also looks somewhat artistic.

[1] https://tromp.github.io/cl/diagrams.html

I do think it can be an art form, and definitely a craft. That's one reason I'm so disheartened by the push to have AI slop replace all our coding efforts.