

The One Thing Programmers and Musicians Have In Common - Oompa
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001214.html

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ken
I think it's simpler than he proposes.

1\. Everybody likes music

2\. Music making is very accessible (offhand, I can't think of any condition
which would prevent one from playing music at all)

3\. If you have the dedication to get good at making programs, you also have
the drive to get at least half-decent at making music

Result: good programmers tend to be musicians. Alan Kay was once a
professional jazz guitarist; I don't find this coincidental.

The problem I have with music-anything analogies is that "music" covers such
gigantic scope that you can make all kinds of generalizations about it, and
they'll be true for _some_ kind of music. Individualistic? Collaborative?
High-tech? Low-tech? Intricate and exact? Improvised and free-form? Notated?
Oral tradition? Hey, we've got that, too! My field is just like music!

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baddox
But the same doesn't go for people with the dedication to get good at doing
various other things, like cooking or cutting hair. Or does it?

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bpyne
About 15 years ago I was curious about the number of programmers I met who
were also musicians. I wish I could remember fully the article I read at the
time but IBM had a formal recruiting strategy for musicians sometime around
the 50's-60's. The company recognized a relationship between musical and
programming ability.

I'm going to speculate that it has something to do with musical composition
being akin to software design.

Paul Hudak is another noteworthy person in the field who pursues music and
makes it part of his research. His book "The Haskell School of Expression"
teaches aspects of Haskell using music composition. As an aside, he also was
involved in a new program at Yale called "Computing and the Arts" which looks
like a heck of a program for developers with artistic leanings.

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moswald
As a musician and a developer, I can agree with most of this. I do however,
see it as two opposite sides of a defined spectrum.

When I am playing an instrument, I typically lose any connection with thought
or the rest of my body not directly involved in playing. My mouth sorta drops
down and I begin to almost drool. Something my girlfriend loves to remind me
of. I am literally lost in the music.

When coding, I am almost hyper aware of the thought process. I am surely
focused on only what is happening relating to the code, but the disconnect
from myself never happens.

I think the connection is the desire to create something and an inborn
understanding of modularity and the flow of ideas/actions. People with these
qualities are often drawn to both.

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msluyter
Ex classical musician checking in. One other possibility that has been hinted
at indirectly: many good musicians are rather introverted (singers being the
notable exception). You have to be -- or at least not be overly extroverted --
in order to lock yourself in a practice room for many hours a day. It's often
lonely. This thus makes musicians temperamentally suited to be programmers.

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Scriptor
I used to play the violin for my high school orchestra. I wasn't great, and I
often wondered how professionals could practice for hours on end. Now I
realize that it may very well be asked how I could sit in front of a computer
programming for hours on end.

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bpyne
It's just a matter of finding something you love to do and it won't feel like
a chore.

In college, I was in a 1 credit small jazz combo that met every Friday from
3-4. After the instructor left at 4, we'd whip out songs we wrote and would
start jamming. Often it was 7 before I looked at the time.

I read an interview with a famous Chen Tai Chi stylist a few years ago. He
recalled practicing 12 hours daily for a few years in his youth. He didn't
talk about it like work, he just got a thrill out of every moment.

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martythemaniak
I've often wondered how much of this "Programming is like playing music" is
true, and how much of it shit we make up to make ourselves look better. I
mean, musicians _are_ much cooler in the popular psyche than programmers.

I play a bit of guitar and I can think up of all sorts of seemingly valid
comparisons, but I don't if they're just too general to draw any conclusions
from. After all, many of these are just as applicable to something like
photography (another thing that seems common amongst programmer types)

One thing I _can_ say for sure is that true or not, you can use these
musician/programmer analogies to impress girls, who'll start to think of you
as the "creative type" many say they like ;)

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pavelludiq
I love music. I never actually tried to learn any instrument, so i may buy a
guitar this sumer and just have fun with it(i doubt its going to be any good).

From what i know about music, and other creative activities, i can say that
programming has some similarities with the other creative arts, but it an
entirely different art of its own. We can draw connections between all the
arts, painting is like music, programing is like dancing, i can write a blog
post on all of those, but they are still different arts.

Maybe knowing how to play doesn't make you a better programmer directly, maybe
it does it indirectly by making you more creative in general. Those are my
thoughts on the topic.

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Avshalom
Part of the problem with all the Programmers are the same as Foo comparisons
is that programming styles are so numerous that any one can find similarities
between their style and some hobby, it's just that no one ever compares it to
say knitting, crochet, scrap booking, gardening, etc. because those all strike
people as a step down in terms of "leading a meaningful life"

The only thing I can find in common with musicians is that both are incurable
gadget nerds.

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shaunxcode
Totally, for instance as a drummer and a programmer I find myself comparing
"drum patterns" and riffs as procedures, but particularly with drum patterns
they can be re-used across bands/styles and songs even within the same record!
So being a drummer is definitely about code re-use and modular design. I could
go off on my project to generate recursive music (live) but thats a whole
other world. I would like to think that I drum with s-expressions.

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zupatol
My first job was in a small software company where all programmers worked
part-time. Their interests outside the job were varied widely. One wrote
software for chimney sweepers, another published a chess fanzine, there was a
coach of an athletics team and I make comics. But yes, there also was one
musician.

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jcl
Pardon my curiousity, but what did the "software for chimney sweepers" do?

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zupatol
I think it had something to do with the paperwork specific to their trade.

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nx
I find it easy to express myself through music and relax a bit when my head is
full of binary trees.

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msg
Being a programmer is like being a garbage collector. You drive a huge truck,
don't mind noxious odors, make frequent stops, you lift heavy things, your job
is extremely monotonous, and you get paid better than teachers.

The parallels are really much closer to the arts than they are to the service
sector.

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baddox
That's a sweet Meinl Byzance ride he's got in the youtube vid.

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SteveC
Long hair and beards?

