Being a designer by trade and programmer by accident, I've always found this funny. That programmers have no problem having their work being compared to poetry or art in general. Designers, on the other hand, get enraged on the sole mention that design is an art or --worse-- a craft.
Heh, I'm actually a designer as well, and a printmaker who was vetted for the tamarind institute a while ago. Designers don't want to be boxed into the art world, as modern art is strictly solipsistic, and attempts to make a statement in and of itself and it's context. Design attempts to amplify a statement, to add value, clarify and guide. Saying design is art and craft is like saying engineering is intuition and emotion. There are a shade of in both, but it's missing the point.
Programming on the other hand, is not a strictly visual field which helps any analogy, and while the product is engineering, the act of is comparable to an art. There's no such thing as perfect code, and the hacky little stuff is analogous to the troubled motion's of Jackson Pollck's arms struggling against the constraints of physics to make a statement.
That programmers have no problem having their work being compared to poetry or art in general.
I wouldn't go that far. A lot of programmers have civil-engineer envy and would be incensed if you suggested that what they did was driven by anything other than cold, hard numbers, physical laws, and building codes.
programmers : hackers :: designers : artists.
The difference between an artist and a designer is that the designer is incapable of using ugliness to express a truth. (Also, money.)
I like to liken programmers to poets, but only because of the volume of bad meter and code humanity has produced.