Programming absolutely has an artistic side. I’ve read beautiful, elegant code that expressed powerful ideas in ways that made them seem obviously correct. You don’t get that from a pure engineering approach. Mathematicians know what I mean here.
There's a reason I'm writing Grace in F#, after all.
Oh no, don't confuse the brush strokes with art.
A computer program isn't an idea: It's a set of instructions to the computer to accomplish that idea. The "elegant code" is merely the brush strokes, the idea lives in your head and in the resulting program.
Some math proofs are mechanical and boring. Some are astoundingly elegant. Both get the job done. The latter gets talked about and praised.
As someone who writes that kind of source code: It's not art, it's years of discipline and careful attention to detail.
A different way to say it: A song, and its performance, are art. The sheet music, and the filing system, are not. Yet, both are important and critical tools for preserving and communicating the song. The "legibility" of sheet music comes through discipline, but isn't the art itself.
Git is the filing system, and source code is the sheet music.