Why code is art

You can have endless debates about what art is, or what isn't. To prevent this debate you have to deal with my personal opinion that art is something esthetically pleasing. Art should excite and intrigue the viewer and I've been intrigued by technology all my life. The discovery on how to control fire increased the availability of food sources. The wheel increased the distance or load we can carry. Recent communication developments made it more easy to be in contact with someone on the other side of the world, than to talk to your neighbor. If it wasn't for technology, there wouldn't be a difference between humans and Bonobos.
Now try to envision a world were all technological artifacts are pure practical and optimal economic constructed without any attention for design. That world will most likely be a grey dull variant of what we have today. So if technology is not just pure technology, it´s also art!* Coding is generally seen as problem solving, in a same way technology is usually defined. For me technology can be something that's completely useless in a problem solving matter, but is esthetically pleasing. Some very basic lines of code or programming rules can create beautiful emergent structures. Conway showed this in a very nice way with his game of life:

Mathematical ideas about fractals have been around since the 17th century, but it took till the computer era before it could reach a larger audience:

Coding can produce beautiful results and new ways of understanding popular scientific topics such as evolution, self-reference, chaos, emergence, etcetera etcetera.

*according to my personal definition of art.