I've worked in multiple fields, including art *and* development.
I.e. I've been on both sides of what some people appear to believe is a fence.
I've done graphic design (everything from multilingual brochures and leaflets to websites), as well as animated sprites and tiles back in the days of Rainbird / OCP's "Art Studio" for the Atari ST.
I've also coded (in assembly language, among others) actual, published, video games too.
These days, I make my living as a translator and technical author.
Programming is a craft, like any other.
Graphic design is also a craft.
This notion we have today of "Art" vs. craft is a relatively recent invention that didn't really exist prior to the 1800s. Michelangelo didn't consider himself as anything other than an interior decorator. In fact, "art" is an abbreviation of "artisan", which is synonymous with "craftsman".
@Frank Fisher: Your broad—and, frankly, insulting—generalisations and descriptions of what you *think* artists do all day do not help your argument. If anything, they undermine it. You accuse the ignorant masses of not realising how much work is involved in programming, yet people are pirating music and movies far more often than software. Do you think a successful blockbuster movie costs pennies to make and is produced by a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings who do little more than "colour in" celluloid frames with crayon? I suspect not. Yet you're including all those people in your crass generalisation.
The fundamental problem is that, without form, there can *be* no function. Similarly, without function, there can be no form. You need BOTH. In equal measure. THAT was, is, and forever will be Apple's "secret sauce". It's not that Jobs *relegated* the technology to second place. It's that Apple *combined* both art and design to produce products that were greater than the sum of their parts.
If you want to know what programmers create when left to their own devices, I give you the GNU / Linux community. Their work does very well in traditionally 'techie' markets, such as servers and embedded platforms, but they have never, ever, managed to make any kind of dent in the *consumer* sector. Why? Because they haven't a bloody clue about consistency and interface design.
Making complex systems easy to interface with is bloody hard work. It is NOT trivial. Apple's approach is that of a painter or sculptor: knowing what to leave *out*. Because the more "stuff" you nail on, the more complicated and scary the customer will think it is. And no amount of advertising will help you there.