I think the comparison is a bit "unfair".

When writing was first invented, it was presumably, mostly for functional purposes. Keeping records; Calculating taxes; Government administration; etc. If one looked at writing at early stages of development, one could very well come to a similar conclusion that "Writing is not literature".

And that still is true, mostly. Writing generally is not literature. Just look at the comments under a Donald Trump video for example. Not sure anyone would want to read those. In fact I'm pretty sure <0.1% of the comments here in HN would qualify as "literature". But if you said "Writing is not literature", despite it being true, it's probably misleading.

The term "literature" is generally reserved to the finer styles of writing that in addition to whatever functional purpose it served, had an aesthetic to it that makes it worthwhile for others to read. Most literature comes from a long tradition where styles and techniques are developed to make the text more interesting and pleasing. The traditions and the corpus of literature grow stronger as time goes by. Of course, best works accumulate and are archived for future generations to study as well. This has gone on for thousands of years for "natural language literature". It has a head start of thousands of years.

Code has been invented for less than 100 years. That's nothing in the greater historical context. Imagine digging up ancient clay tablets of which 99% talk about how much bales of barley we need to collect to feed workers next year, and concluding that this language/culture is not capable of literature. That's what the article is arguing essentially.

But do we have evidence otherwise? Are there code so aesthetically pleasing (or at least interesting) that it might be read just for pure joy? Yes there is. Just not a lot. For example, check out the entries of IOCCC. Some of them are insanely beautiful, and I have no idea how the authors could have created them. They're the equivalent of carefully written poems in C, except they're possibly even harder to write.

So yes, while I agree that the article is probably literally correct in saying (vast majority of) code is not literature, I think it's wrong to interpret that statement as "code can't be literature". It obviously can be in a substantial way.

It's just that the cultural norms haven't caught up yet, and while people today somehow think they become more "refined" after reading for example Shakespeare (which I have no idea why besides gatekeeping attempts from the elite class), the programmer class hasn't yet taken over schools to shove quick reverse sqrt (0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 )) down student's throats and call it a well-rounded education. (Tangent: yes, all the things you felt were useless in school are probably really as useless as understanding Q_rsqrt, i.e. not very useful unless you really need it, but 99% people don't really except for showing class status)

I grant you that I can't think of any equivalent to long form novels that might work in code, since telling and listen to stories are somehow baked into basic human psyche for which code has no equivalent, but literature is more than novels so I'd claim at least code can be a meaningful subset of literature.