Not really comparable, art and code are generally original. Transposing competitive sports to software would be as if everybody competed year after year to see who implemented the best and fastest quicksort in C in the shortest amount of time for instance. It's not usually about expression, it's about perfecting something until you're the best at it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that although like the parent I can't say that I find that particularly interesting myself.

Oh I don't find sports interesting at all either, though I would argue that people do in fact try those sorts of competitions in coding. My beef with parent is the notion that this stuff is objectively pointless somehow just because _we_ don't find it interesting.