Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Software should be an engineering field, which exists to help humans, not as some personal art project for your self expression it makes me sad that you see these things as somehow in conflict with each other :(
It fills me with joy to know that those are irreconcilable. It lifts the burden of having to reconcile these things and I know that my self expression can be directed elsewhere. Whatever beauty exists in engineering comes from the purity of it. A fighter plane or a microchip looks beautiful, not because it was designed to be so, but because of the purity of the functionality, the harshness of the requirements. If you…
i think you would be interested in demoscene, it’s about exactly this thing: making art out of extremely harsh requirements.