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Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

It's only briefly mentioned, but learning to read music is quite similar in terms of brain function to learning programming. It's symbolic, logical and structured.

My university went so far as to allow students with a bachelor's degree in music to directly enter the computer science master's program.

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In the early days of computing (that is, when computer companies and universities were finding the first people to learn programming) music experience was a strong signal for programming ability! Playing music prepared them for focusing on the low-level details while holding the big picture in their head. [0]

[0] The Dream Machine by Waldrop

Thank you for the reference. I will go check out the book!

Fascinating! Any chance I could know which school it is?

I have worked in both computer science and classical music, and found many crossover talents. Two previous Director of Music at my school (UBC in Canada) in the last few decades are both musicians and engineers/physicists.

Northern Illinois University

(though it's been.... a while... since I graduated.)

The one thing I think is different about reading music is sight-reading, where you're reading it at speed while playing it. I can do that with music and text, but not computer code, even in a language that I'm super familiar with.

Yep. My hypothesis is that this is largely because code is non-linear whereas most written music is usually read in a linear fashion. Agree/disagree?

That seems plausible. Music is written to be read in that way. Writing and sight-reading are a sort of symbiosis. There are no subroutines or abstractions. And a good reader recognizes a lot of patterns by familiarity. There's stuff that goes straight from my eyes to my fingers while I'm thinking about something else. But if you write some completely random note pattern or rhythm (or both at the same time), I might be in trouble.

There are loops which could be considered subroutines. Also if else.

The pattern recognition (and muscle memory that comes with it) is a huge difference between sight-reading music and programming, IMO.

I'm sure if we tried hard enough we could come up with a pretty good analogy between data structures / algorithms and scales / arpeggios / etc... but I've never felt quite the same when recognizing a familiarish algorithm in code as I would when sight-reading some music and having my fingers perform the right kind of movements out of almost unconscious muscle memory.

I think the programming analog of sight reading might be following along with assembly language or other low-level or simple imperative code while mentally tracking basic stuff like register/variable usage and control flow. Sight reading music doesn't involve real-time analysis of the broader abstract structure of the piece. That's not really applicable to high-level code making heavy use of nested abstractions or non-imperative paradigms.

That's right. The level of analysis during sight-reading is along the lines of: "I hope I don't screw up in the next 500 milliseconds, and who's that person who just came in the front door?"

I can read a screen-full of code at time -- sort of like speed reading -- in most of the programming languages that I know.

It took me a while to realize that I was doing this; I only figured it out from when it doesn't work. I can't do it when I'm looking at code that's dark-themed if I normally work with that code light-themed. In that case I have to read the code line by line. It's actually a strange feeling.

Some of my environments are dark themed for certain languages/environments so it's not the dark-theme itself that throws me off but something about the unexpected visual difference.

I've often thought that: "Hackers and Composers", might have been better than: "Hackers and Painters". Or, maybe, they both fit equally (not) well.

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