While I don't like to get into discussions of "what is and isn't art" on account of the whole situation consisting entirely of people quantizing down complex topics into simplistic bullshit for "reasons"...

Even if we accept that the act of programming isn't artistic (which I'm sure some would disagree with), that wouldn't be sufficient to say that gameplay design is not artistic.

Unless you also want to claim that something like musical composition isn't artistic? Because when you compose music, actually specifying that music literally involves programming, whether you're using standard musical notations, or actually generating the sounds in a script in some sort of computing language. Either way, you're specifying a sequence of actions (sounds) for something (people playing instruments, a CPU and some speakers, some other manipulable thing) to carry out.

Or, what if someone produces a beautiful image procedurally through a computer program? Is that less artistic than a painter aiming for a similar result, simply because the painter used paint and the programmer used C++?

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Another question: if you were a highly-skilled programmer, would that by itself imply that you're a great gameplay designer? If the answer isn't an immediately obvious "yes", though this wouldn't decisively conclude much, it should probably throw up some red flags.