Programming differs from other creative activities in that it's about creating a processes that create things.
Consider art. You draw a picture with pencil and a piece of paper. In programming, you define a process of drawing a picture.
True, you can still draw by hand just fine. However, imagine a picture that only exists when someone is looking at it—a picture that you can't draw in advance, only define a process that will draw it at someone's request. That's interaction, which is what programming is mostly about.
There are other activities that involve defining processes of building things—entrepreneurship comes to mind. However, programming seems to be the only one where building a process of creation is so pure and comparable to simply building a thing.
Consider art. You draw a picture with pencil and a piece of paper. In programming, you define a process of drawing a picture.
True, you can still draw by hand just fine. However, imagine a picture that only exists when someone is looking at it—a picture that you can't draw in advance, only define a process that will draw it at someone's request. That's interaction, which is what programming is mostly about.
There are other activities that involve defining processes of building things—entrepreneurship comes to mind. However, programming seems to be the only one where building a process of creation is so pure and comparable to simply building a thing.