I’ve never been an obfuscator, but I’ve always viewed coding as an art form. I started programming in my early twenties having spent over a decade building a music career. When writing my first programs, I obsessed over not just making the program work, but making it exceptional, and also making it beautiful to look at, even to the point of showing my code to friends hoping they would see its beauty. The parallels between programming and music composition were obvious to me, and the process I approached both with was strikingly similar. In some ways, I see obfuscation as another genre of programming, similar to how many rubyists strive to write eloquent code in addition to meeting all other requirements. Needless to say, i had a delightful time reading your post about the artistic side of programming.