Programming should be like art, where you try and learn different skills and tools to get better over time.... Not a continuous game of whack-a-mole where your try to hit everything with a hammer...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Code is art 😊

Honestly, art can be pretty whack-a-mole too. I did animation for a bit, and a lot of it is "bug"fixing. Instead of the compiler and linger you have an Art/Animation Director who basically does something similar. And yells more lol.

@RememberMe but you get better right and naturally try different things, be creative and improve...

Not just we've always done it that way... We don't need to bother with this new thing

@billgates yes, but a lot of it is an absolutely tedious slog of doing the same old thing again and again. Just like coding. You have interesting stuff in coding too, like solving a particularly difficult problem using something fancy.

Programming is like creating optimized patterns for solving a design problem in my opinion. Art. Whatever you call it. It's definitely not something you can brute force things to find a way to do something.
It works sometimes but fundamentally it's not just that.

Just like painting and a brush, code is just a tool. Want to make art? Make art. But the tools is applicable for a lot of purposes.

I like to think of coding more like a craft. Art is so loosely defined, but a carpenter will just about make the same structure every damn time he faces a problem that requires it, because it's stable and proven to work, while an artist will create a different sculpture or change something at a whim.