> I'll slightly disagree here because code needs to be read by a computer and by your human teammates.

I still don't think that makes it art and this is why: art can't be simplified. Code can.

Take that to it's extreme and you see that code can be simplified down to nothing without anything being destroyed. Art can't.

Maybe you could say that the act of programming (or simplifying) is an artform, but that's not what we're talking about here.

We're talking about the product of that process, which is just instructions to accomplish a task.