Literature is not an inherent quality, for me. Literature (and art more broadly) is among other things a lens that humans look at statements and groups of state

Literature is not an inherent quality, for me. Literature (and art more broadly) is among other things a lens that humans look at statements and groups of statements through. There is no "Is this literature?", there is only "what happens when I treat this 'as literature'"? Is it useful to treat the complex interconnected statements in a codebase as literature? Yes, probably, to some people. For me music and plays both provide good structural references for me learning to code. It is occasionally useful to me to connect these things. But I also treat literature itself as a bit of a specimen as the author suggests- I want to know about a poem, what is b it, how does it work, w why is it this way and not some other way. I want to "run" a poem out loud and see what the sounds are. Some of the other comments point out that the literature idea doesn't work for all code. It probably helps if both the author and the reader buy in to the idea. But I can't get behind the idea that it's true to say "code isn't literature" when what seems to be the case is that literature is a thing we can do to texts, not a thing we must do. Code might be a genre of text? I don't know. But maybe the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater here.