Saul Albert (2002), ÔUseless UtilitiesÕ, in, Signwave, Auto-Illustrator Users Guide, (first written 2001), Plymouth: i-DAT/Spacex, pp. 89-99. 

Use-value is something Saul Albert discusses in his essay 'Useless Utilities' (2002), opposing the romantic notion that would define art in terms of its lack of utility. This is perhaps a key issue for the understanding of the aesthetic value of software. Albert sees this as 'In some ways, Albert suggests that at worse 'art for art's sake has been replaced by the idea of 'art for technology's sake' with software simply reduced to the role of tool. In much commercial software production there is a crude distinction made where content is seen to be supplied by the 'creatives'.

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Richard Wright (2004), ÔSoftware Art After Programming,Õ Metamute, http://www.metamute.com/look/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=1&NrIssue=28&NrSection=10&NrArticle=1397&ST_max=0, July.

Against the history of art and computing, Richard Wright traces 'divergence between programmers and program users' based around the question of whether a computer was a medium or a tool (2004). This was made complex when a gallery painter like Harold Cohen, in the early 1980s, shifts to developing software to automate his artwork. To Wright, Cohen's AARON program seems to represent the historical transition towards contemporary culture where the use of computers are pervasive. As a result the terms have fundamentally changed for the artist-programmer:
' In a world where artists use software to write software that will be seen by virtue of other software, questions about the Ôaesthetics of the codeÕ become a symptom of not being able to see the wood for the trees. Programming is not only the material of artistic creation, it is the context of artistic creation. Programming has become software.' (2004) 
In a hierarchy of programming languages, Wright points out that not all programming practices are equal. He is thinking of the predominance of scripting languages  such as Flash Actionscript or Director Lingo that use libraries of functions and a certain shared if not prescribed vocabulary of styles. 
For Wright, and he is someone of an older generation associated with working with code as material, the terms change: 
'The question of whether artists should learn to program is replaced by the question of what kind of programming. Which programming practice has the most Ôopen aestheticÕ, capable of envisaging software that is not just the product of an arbitrary confluence of techniques or a slavish mimicry but is aware of all its possible formative cultural and philosophical categories and values.' (2004)
To Wright, it is matter of asking the right questions. He quotes Cohen and then extends it: from - ÔDonÕt ask what you can do with the software, ask what the software can doÕ -  to - ÔDonÕt ask what the software can do, ask what it can do to other software.Õ (2004)

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Andreas Broeckmann (2003), Notes on the Politics of Software Culture

Clearly there is a politics to software culture. Andreas Broeckmann remarks that social processes increasingly rely on software for their execution (2003). through the transmediale festival not least, Broeckmann is concerned with the artistic, non-functionalist, reflexive and speculative practices that propose computer programming as the artistic material.