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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?

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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.

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