It's the difference between a thing and something intended to evoke that thing, which often comes off as a lazy caricature. If you can't see past the surface level, it evokes what is intended. If you can see past it, but you also see the intent, it's like a charade that falls apart. You know that if you were trying to evoke that same idea, you'd do it a different way that would still evoke the intended thing at the surface level, and additionally evoking the intended feeling in people who understand the subject matter being used.
In the case of OP, imagine if it were just poetry with indentation and parentheses and semicolons in places that make it look like code, maybe with some jquery mixed in with fortran and excel functions. If they mixed jquery with fortran and excel to juxtapose them or something, that's one thing. If they do it because "well that looks like code to me" it's another thing.
I think it really is a feeling similar to being lazily caricatured that drives people to criticize. It fails to evoke the thing the artist intends it to evoke to people who see below the surface.
(didn't mean to rant. you just got me thinking "out loud" and rambling)
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2467812/polyglot-progr...
That said, I'm a programmer who took digital media art installation courses in school and I didn't find it to be that different from programming, just with different results/goals. https://cycling74.com/products/max isn't a toy programming environment any more than https://www.ableton.com/en/ is a toy environment or https://origami.design/ is a toy environment. They just have different goals, and perhaps different standards of quality?
In such writing, the challenge is to construct beautiful texts despite of artificial constraints.
They wouldn’t understand the constraints, so they wouldn’t be able to understand why nicer texts wouldn’t satisfy them.
When a wizard from a different house uses your magic, you gotta defend your holy right and exclusivity.
When one of your wizards uses another’s magic, that’s fantastic! No threat to your tribe and might even make it better.
On the other hand, if someone from another discipline uses your discipline as an element in theirs, those from whose discipline that element was taken from seem typically unable to appreciate the broader work of art, instead only fixating on how the materials from their discipline have not been used properly. Case in point: if for example a contemporary artist incorporates some programming in their art installation.