If a beginner can't immediately grasp musical notation, isn't that evidence that it is, in fact, absurd?
A beginner can't grasp the motivations behind the design of musical notation, and I don't expect a beginner to grasp the motivations behind the design of any complex system. That does not make the system absurd.
a) hard (it takes more than a day to understand the complexities)
b) incredibly old
the community should declare it obsolete and immediately begin work on a replacement (preferably based on JavaScript).
The only things that were hard were forgetting to write semicolons after statements in C (I have previously mostly written Pascal), and C declarators — but even the latter were easy after I learned that "declaration reflects use".
The oldest programming languages are only 50 years old, whereas the oldest music notation is at least 4000 years old.
Most programming lanuguages haven't crossed any spoken languages, but modern music notation & terminology has been heavily developed by countries all over Asia and Europe.
This is a big reason why musical notation seems so weird at first, especially to engineers, because it is a legacy that comes from a different time, a different context, in a different language. The people who developed musical notation had different math, different logic and different musical motivations than we have now.
Think about this for a while and it starts to feel like a miracle that musical notation works at all, not to mention how well it works.
Programming languages were developed by people nearer to us in every way, and made to be logical and simple, so it makes sense that they're easier to grasp quickly.
I mean, it's generally agreed that English as a language has accrued so much historical baggage that it's shed any elegance or coherence it may or may not have once had. It would honestly be surprising to me if the same thing didn't happen to musical language.
Buy people who know nothing about how languages and linguistics work, I can only assume.
Most musical notation is meant for non-beginners, right? And a lot of the beginner confusion is from features that are useful for advanced users. So there's a tradeoff.
There might, of course, be changes to be had. But a lot of beginner confusion is because the higher-level abstractions are needed.
A good example in mathematical notation is order of operations. Why not just do left to right? Or just going with Polish Notation?
Standard order of operations work well for people working with large formula, because they allow you to write many common things without many parentheses. But mandatory parentheses + left-to-right only would be easier for beginners.