class: Alley(TinPan)
By Mitch Berg
One of the odd things I”ve observed in 16 years in one form of IT or another; many of the best programmers I have worked with majored in, of all things, music.
This seems counterintuitive to people whose primary background is engineering, mathematics, software or other stereotypically left-brain activities, who tend to think music is far-right-brain and emotion-driven. There’s something to that – but there’s much more to it.
Mastering an instrument, music theory, and especially any kind of serious composition, particularly jazz or “classical”, is a frightfully logical activity. Those who do any of the above really, really well often have many of the mental tools needed to be good software engineers – not that the academic mainstream of either discipline brags about it much.
One of the examples of this – a colleague of mine from a dotcom we both worked at back in the nineties – extends the idea, classifying programmers in classical music terms:
For example, some engineers are Beethovens. Driven perfectionists, constantly refining and revising their code, never content for it to be just “good enough”. Beethovens are utterly fearless about using “revolutionary” new approaches and techniques. They aren’t motivated by what’s fashionable or lucrative; their only concern is to blaze new trails and create radically innovative solutions that nobody has ever seen before.
I’ve known a few of these. In at least one case the programmer I’m thinkiing of (not the author that I’m linking to, just to be clear), like Beethoven, had no problem insisting it was everyone else’s duty to support him (in terms of organizational effort and project time rather than financially, in this case) as he worked on his grand transformation. The Beethoven analogy seemed particularly apt.
Other engineers are Mozarts. Great software just seems to “pour” out of them, as effortlessly as breathing. They’re not so concerned with breaking new ground, but their code “just works” and is elegant and easy to understand and maintain. They are masters of the tools of the trade. They’re not always reliable though, preferring to avoid work, and don’t like producing on a deadline.
Then there are the Haydns. Steady, dependable, consistently cranking out one app after another like a machine. While the Beethovens and Mozarts work best on their own, Haydns are great delegators and collaborators. Their code isn’t likely to change the world, but neither is it likely to crash or contain bugs, and you can count on them to deliver on time and under budget.
It seems like I’ve been running into a lot of Neil Diamonds and Desmond Childs lately. And I think at least one of the author and my mutual acquaintances might pass for Richard Wagner.
It’s too bad Music History isn’t taught in schools any more, because this would be a great software engineer interview question: “If you were a composer, which one would you be?”. I wonder how many recent computer science students could provide an intelligent answer?
Convinced as so many from both the “hard” sciences and the humanities are that never shall the ‘twain meet, mentally speaking, I’d suggest “zero”.
And “Agile” development is the equivalent of the Brill Building. And not in the Goffin/King sense of the term, if you catch my drift.
November 5th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
You seem to ignore the studies that show that listening to classical music will increase mathematical ability while listening and for a short time after.
One of the more interesting expositions of the relationship of music and math is still Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter.
November 5th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
interesting, I will have to show this post to my dad who is a programmer and has been since the computer stone ages. He got his first job as a programmer in 1976 and took his first programming course in, I sh*t you not, 1969. He’s a loner but from what I know it seems like he’s a Mozart codewise.
November 5th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
You seem to ignore the studies
Well, you completely ignored the link between immersing children in foreign languages and increased math skills!
Or, perhaps, we both wrote within a certain scope, and realized that we couldn’t cover everything…
November 5th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
classical music grates on me, give me Metallica or AC/DC any day of the week. Classical music’s got nothing on ‘Enter Sandman’ usually called the #1 metal song of all time.
November 5th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Enh. Why choose? I like it all.
Leonard Bernstein said that the bottom 95% of any genre – jazz, classical, pop, blues, folk, what-have-you – is always crap, and the top 5%, whatever the genre, is worth a listen. There are times I’m in the mood for Metallica (usually at the gym), and there are times, like this morning at work, where there was no substitute for Mahler’s Ninth Symphiony.
Vive la difference!
November 5th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
I’m definitely the Beethoven type myself. Symphonies of gracefully written abstract phrases that produce a harmonious result when the properties are defined and the class instantiated. Takes forever to write a PHP class that returns an html header element but by God it’s a piece of beauty when it’s done.
I once knew a software engineer who fixed problems in her code by inserting a variable named ‘$tip-toe’ here & there with an appropriate value. I can’t believe that they teach that in a computer science course. Maybe tap dancing school?
November 5th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
Mitch, my point was that most parents these days are inundated with exhortations to get their kids to listen to classical music to help their math skills. Somehow folks are managing to connect music with math without understanding that mathematical reasoning underlies most of the hard sciences, and even softer disciplines like software engineering.
(I tend to favor Haydns since in the hardware side of computing delivering on time is more important than getting it perfect. Final tweaks and workarounds are left for the software types.)
November 6th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Like wine, beer, sticks, cymbals, keyboards, mice, guns, glasses, chairs, and shoes, there is a wide variety of classical music in the world. Keep drinking, playing, computing, shooting, looking, sitting, walking, listening and you’re bound to find something you like.
November 8th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Heh, I was also a music major (piano w/choral minor), but I do NOT have the mindset to program. My crowning triumph was managing to believably play Chopin’s Polonaise in Ab (Op 53) in recital, and not have people wince or shake their heads in pity.
November 8th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Mastering an instrument, music theory, and especially any kind of serious composition, particularly jazz or ”classical”, is a frightfully logical activity.
Coming from the musical world of keyboards, to properly play/interpret a 4 voice fugue on a pipe organ with proper registration (which sets of pipes to use), is a monumental task for playing something by Bach, gargantuan for later era composers. I took 9 months of organ lessons and barely managed to wade my way thru the stereotypical simple beginner Bach fugue in e minor – probably the equivalent of Stairway to Heaven for guitar n00bs.