That probably is part of the problem here.

For starters, you could try looking into Jeffrey Shaw & Gideon May.

Netochka Nezvanova is another name that springs to mind (but that likely will not qualify by some of your criteria), the Electronic Disturbance Theater is another.

There are probably 100's if not 1000's of artists that have chosen to use the computer as their medium of choice, usually they don't make the code central to the expression because the code is the vehicle.

But there are definitely artists that craft with the code as their central means of expression.

I feel that by first stating something overbroad and now redefining it in a way that is overly narrow to then be able to say that 'see, nobody fits the exact same niche' is a bit of a cheap trick, after all, _why was just _why, unique, like every other artist. So no, if you keep on adding conditions why nobody was like him or even crafting 'art' you can easily exclude the rest of the world and maintain your claim. But that's a pretty limiting act and it seems like a very technical way to win the argument.

_why was neither the first, the last or particularly special in what he did unless you mean special to be used as 'specific' rather than as a claim to quality. He successfully promoted himself, his art and incidentally the ruby language. But that does not warrant such overbroad claims as were made above.

I'm reasonably sure I won't agree with you on any definition of art. But, uh, here's some stuff. I may-or-may-not think of some of it as art. I do think it's stuff that keeps the coding world from being some dreadful place of "craftsmanship" and "professionalism" and things.

The miniKanren presentations are wonderful. They're all "and now let's run this stuff backwards. Because because." http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren

Meta-circular evaluators. Page 13 of http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m6hoOelZH8&list=ECE18841... http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/examples.html#./examples:h7 ("After completing the preceding exercise, use the interpreter to run a copy of the interpreter, and use the copy to run another copy of the interpreter. Repeat this process to see how many levels deep it will go before the system grinds to a halt." :D)

SICP opens with this: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-3.html I think it's lovely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra "One of Dijkstra's sidelines was serving as Chairman of the Board of the fictional Mathematics Inc., a company that he imagined having commercialized the production of mathematical theorems in the same way that software companies had commercialized the production of computer programs. He invented a number of activities and challenges of Mathematics Inc. and documented them in several papers in the EWD series."

Also obfuscated code and some esolang stuff, I guess.

I remember some competition that was about creating and hiding some bug that did some particular thing in code that appeared to do something else, in a way that seemed (if discovered) like it was a mistake. That was cute.

Oh, and maybe http://sigbovik.org/ Maybe not.

The UNIX community has a similar artistic component. It's built into the genes of the thing, really. There is humor, beauty, politics, and more, in the UNIX tradition. The free unices, in particular, have always been about a love of the process and a celebration of human expression.

_why took it in a highly original direction. No argument from me on that. I think _why was/is/always shall be awesome. But, it's not the first time someone used code as art, directly and without intermediary forms.

What makes _why special, perhaps, is that he made it impossible to miss the art. The art was not subtle, it was not for coders only, and it was cognizant of the knowledge gap that makes so many people fearful of code and unaware of the art contained therein.

_why's totally cool and stuff (and bold, and visionary, and very likable). But, let's not get hyperbolic about his place in the pantheon of code and beauty.