I learned to play guitar by my own when I was around 12. You don't really even need to know music theory to play guitar, as long as you understand the shapes etc.

Over time, I developed shorthands for understanding theory like i can easily look at a fretboard and know which note it is.

But what bugged me is that you seem to imply the reason why you couldn't learn a instrument was because you did not understand the why. That makes very little sense to me. I know several professional musicians who don't even know what a mode is or what formal notation is. One of them has pitch perfect ear, he can literally hear anything and tranpose that on his guitar. He has no idea how notes work and just writes tabs.

So while this is very nicely from a programmer point of view and an objective explanation of things but learning all this will not make you a better musician is the point.

Practice above all. Dont try to fit all theory into the pratice but understand what you are practicing particulalry using the theory. Otherwise you end up with all theory and no practice experience of using that theory and creativity.

As a perosn who likes code, this is interesting. As a musician who also understands music theory, this is kind of alienating in terms of how it presented. Like if someone just read this article and thought they understood music theory now, they would be pretty unsufferable to actual musicians.