Well I think painting (or composition of any type) is a category of activity whose instances are all fairly alike: theory-building, mathematical modelling, painting, programming.

But the question is where do the differences lie. My hypothesis for one difference is that we dont write code like painters paint.

That is bad. We should. Hence my advocacy for literate programming.

It isn't to be dismissive of painting, it is to say we put ourselves in a more precarious position by how little we support ourselves with our tools.

Painters (, mathematicians, etc.) are all working with pencil-and-paper in quite a radically different way.

I think this goes some way to saying, actually, there is a bit of a difference here.