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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

> Why is this at the top of HN?

What the ..? Because it's a cool blog post of course! It carefully and clearly explains things the author understands about music (in a much better way than I've seen before), and then clearly and carefully goes on to describe and comment on some things the authors doesn't understand as well.

Basically, it's a Julia Evans blog post but about music instead of system programming. I've never seen a comment like yours on top of an HN thread about any of her posts. What's going on, somehow because this is about music and not programming we need to get all pedantic?

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"Get pedantic"? No, the blog post is what happens when people only hear half the story and then proceed to go crazy on the part they don't know. It's a crapfest

It's the same though process used by some politicians and conspiracy theorists

I don't think the commentor is suggesting that music is an unworthy topic to be on the top, rather that the post is insufficiently insightful to be on the top.

Yes, this.

> Basically, it's a Julia Evans blog post but about music instead of system programming.

The joy of Julia Evans blog posts is her commitment to learn, and to document as she learns, interesting or difficult things until she's mastered them. Not to give them a once over lightly and then snidely dismiss them as broken.

I think people with experience in the field are just annoyed with her poorly-conceived assertions at the end, e.g. "This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever." rather than pedantry.

Only a lot of experience could just be cargo cult and busy work, as is in most fields.

I.e the music world's analogue to: "but of course you need to make XML configuration files for everything and FactoryFactorySingletons etc, that's how we do things in J2EE".

There's been other proposed notations, but they all have their own shortcomings. Any alternative would have to be much better than the standard one, otherwise nobody would bother to retrain to use it.

The problem with this blog post is that it's clear that there's a lot they don't understand but they still criticize without finding out the why (which many commenters here have provided those answers).

I think the blog post could be much better written without the uniformed commentary as there's some things that are good about it. It's just that the other parts puts some people off from recommending it.

I'm not an a musician by most measures, and definitely not an experienced one. I lack exactly training and experience, so my understanding of music notation comes from the same kind of observations as the post author - only over a longer time and in the context of playing many instruments badly. So I don't think I drank any cool aid.

So, my comment is a response to the specific points they made. Yes, there may be cargo culture around it, and certainly the system isn't perfect. But their examples are non-examples of that.

Is it? It starts out with and I quote.

"I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it"

"I’m a bit out in the weeds from here on. C major is identical to A minor, and I don’t understand why we need both."

This is why it shouldn't be here. Too little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It's good to be intrigued about things as you study them, but it's dangerous to start forming strong opinions and tearing them down when you don't have a solid foundation. I see this often on HN, in the form of, OOP sucks, Abstraction will kill you. I learned golang for a week and you should never use it...

I believe everyone should have a medium for expression and express themselves, the problem is that "newbies" to the topic sometimes read these highly opinionated posts and believe it to be the truth and get primed for the wrong information. I like music BTW and system programming too, yes, the musical notation is weird, but you have to dive in to grok it. It's like system programming, WTF is ioctl()? But dive in and it makes sense, accept it and move on, unless you can come up with better.

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