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> ...ask a musician if they are really in the weeds of why the instrument is producing music (the physics behind it!). They are probably aware that it's vibrating air, but, in general, they won't know the theory behind it.

A big difference is that, unlike computing, their instrument probably won't stop working because of some subtle change to physics introduced by a seemingly-unrelated change made to the universe by some other party in the musical instrument / air / molecules / atoms / quarks "stack". Theirs is a world with some assurance of stability.

Ours is a field built upon shifting sands. Knowing what the foundations are that the edifice you've constructed sits upon allows you to affect repairs when it crumbles unexpectedly.

Musical instruments can and do break for unknown reasons and it's exactly as reasonable to expect musicians to crack out their machine tools to fix them as it is to expect a javascript dev to fix a kernel bug.

Computers are a relatively new invention. There are still people around from the times when knowing the entire stack from top to bottom was not just valuable but necessary. They worked during periods when abstractions were far leakier than they are today and far less reliable but also far simpler.

Some of those people have persisted with the attitude that knowing the stack top to bottom is still necessary as the complexity of those stacks have grown in complexity geometrically. This does not signify wisdom, only age.

I think for the analogy to work either we compare:

- a musician knowing how to fix their instrument vs a programmer knowing how to fix their keyboard/computer

Or

- a musician fixing some harmony, or progression vs a programmer fixing a bug in code

Otherwise it does not feel like a fair comparison.

To really press on the analogy some more:

- Knowing how to change strings is comparable to knowing how to use the browser console

- Knowing music theory is comparable to understanding programming language theory

- Being competent on the fretboard is comparable to being competent in one programming language. Strumming/fingerpicking could be considered another language.

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And then for the controversial one...

- Only knowing how to use music-making software is like only knowing how to use low-code applications for development.

dodges tomatoes

> Knowing what the foundations are that the edifice you've constructed sits upon allows you to affect repairs when it crumbles unexpectedly.

Finally get to use this bit of knowledge: 'effect' (the verb) was the word you wanted there.

Thanks! That one frequently trips me up. If I think about it for a moment I know "his affect" is different than "the effect something has", but, as is sadly and normally the case, I power thru writing w/o thinking as much as I should.

> However, this is not for everyone; ask a musician if they are really in the weeds of why the instrument is producing music (the physics behind it!). They are probably aware that it's vibrating air, but, in general, they won't know the theory behind it.

Not a great metaphor. First, most instruments were invented by people who had no knowledge of the theory, not even of sound involving vibrating air. Second, many musicians do understand some of how their instrument works. It's not hard to understand how a guitar works, how to tune it, and how to fix a broken string. Most can't fix a broken body or neck, but they do understand why it stopped being playable. Hell, I knew a flutist who simply started to build her own recorders. Zero knowledge of physics, but after a few years producing great sounding period instruments.

> However, this is not for everyone; ask a musician if they are really in the weeds of why the instrument is producing music (the physics behind it!). They are probably aware that it's vibrating air, but, in general, they won't know the theory behind it.

Knowing the nitty-gritty of the acoustics theory and the related math may not help you much as a musician... (that being said, if you're building a home studio or doing any mixing/mastering, you'll find it helpful to learn about physics of standing waves etc).

However, the details of how frequencies come to form the well-tempered scale with all the tradeoffs and imperfections, and the low-level details of music theory, would be something many musician nerds would actually know.

I think everyone needs to know everything they do professionally from first principles. And if you are to build abstractions, they also need to be based on first principles in order to be easy to reason about.

Sometimes I'm learning a framework, and I'm in the part of "...you write this easy syntax and it outputs pure HTML!", which is great. But then the next line you read "also, when you use [obscure symbol], it does [obscure thing] in order to respect [obscure concept]". You have no idea what to do other than start googling those 3 new things, none of which are explained properly or at all in the current "super simple framework" documentation. I think even naming should make sense.