{"id":5841,"date":"2009-11-05T13:00:27","date_gmt":"2009-11-05T18:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5841"},"modified":"2009-11-05T14:21:06","modified_gmt":"2009-11-05T19:21:06","slug":"class-alleytinpan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5841","title":{"rendered":"class: Alley(TinPan)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

This seems counterintuitive to people whose primary background is engineering, mathematics,\u00a0 software\u00a0or other stereotypically left-brain activities, who tend to think music is\u00a0far-right-brain and emotion-driven.\u00a0 There’s something to that – but there’s much more to it.<\/p>\n

Mastering an instrument, music theory, and especially any kind of serious composition, particularly jazz or\u00a0“classical”,\u00a0is a frightfully <\/em>logical activity.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

One of the examples of this – a colleague of mine from a dotcom we both worked at back in the nineties – extends the idea<\/a>, classifying programmers in classical music terms:<\/p>\n

For example, some engineers are Beethovens. Driven perfectionists, constantly refining and revising their code, never content for it to be just \u201cgood enough\u201d. Beethovens are utterly fearless about using \u201crevolutionary\u201d new approaches and techniques. They aren\u2019t motivated by what\u2019s fashionable or lucrative; their only concern is to blaze new trails and create radically innovative solutions that nobody has ever seen before.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve known a few of these.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The Beethoven analogy seemed particularly apt.<\/p>\n

Other engineers are Mozarts. Great software just seems to \u201cpour\u201d out of them, as effortlessly as breathing. They\u2019re not so concerned with breaking new ground, but their code \u201cjust works\u201d and is elegant and easy to understand and maintain. They are masters of the tools of the trade. They\u2019re not always reliable though, preferring to avoid work, and don\u2019t like producing on a deadline.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems like I’ve been running into a lot of Neil Diamonds and Desmond Childs lately.\u00a0 And I think at least one of the author and my mutual acquaintances might pass for Richard Wagner.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s too bad Music History isn\u2019t taught in schools any more, because this would be a great software engineer interview question: \u201cIf you were a composer, which one would you be?\u201d. I wonder how many recent computer science students could provide an intelligent answer?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And “Agile” development is the equivalent of the Brill Building<\/a>.\u00a0 And not in the Goffin\/King sense of the term,\u00a0 if you catch my drift.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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,\u00a0 software\u00a0or other stereotypically left-brain activities, who tend to think music is\u00a0far-right-brain and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5841"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5955,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5841\/revisions\/5955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}