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I'm a musician who performs for money maybe 2 times a week on average. And I don't make a lot of money, and I'm not all that great, etc. I have a different pe

I'm a musician who performs for money maybe 2 times a week on average. And I don't make a lot of money, and I'm not all that great, etc. I have a different perspective on your point. When I was little, I learned to read and perform. And I could get around playing clarinet in my school band. But I never really read or even played all that well. Years later, I had more or less stopped reading because none of the people I play with read anything... but I had been composing a lot of music and had learned to play several instruments including piano and guitars. You don't have to "write" to program a sequencer or tell the banjo player to play these 4 chords over and over. In the last couple of years, however, I've gotten more interested in theory and had a lot more opportunities to play written music (cello and double bass with my wife's orchestra and later bass and piano with a 16-piece jazz band). It really wasn't until I was able to play well that I got to where I could functionally read well enough to do it on sight. I now know a whole lot more theory-- enough at least to look at some intervals and say "ah, that's the root to the three to the five in the bass" without worrying about the key, and then have my hands just play the stuff. And the reason I have somewhat of a grasp on theory is that I've played for years in situations where I've had to improvise a bass line or guitar solo for a tune I've never heard, and so theory has been both very helpful and proven by practice. My point is that I feel the same way about code: I have a hard time reading code at a useful level if I couldn't have written similar code. So I feel that it can be more helpful to learn to 'create' in some fashion -- I don't know if I'd call it writing-- before learning to formally code things. I don't agree that learning to read before we learn to speak is all that helpful for most folks.

cturner 10y ago
You make a good point. There's lots of accomplished musicians who never learn to read. And some "full-stack" musicians like yourself who start with tabs or similar, and who come to writing earlier than reading. I think several of the Beatles never bothered to learn western notation. My analogy has some problems. Still, I think it's interesting to consider the real possibility of a future where code-reading is a mainstream skill, and where writing is considered a specialisation. And where code writing is done with the expectation of serving the reader. I've started to mess with figured bass recently. I have an old ukulele and am seeing if I can fit some lute songs to it, and get used to taking my finger patterns from those marks. Kind of a step up from tabs.
- scarecrowbob 10y ago
  " think it's interesting to consider the real possibility of a future where code-reading is a mainstream skill, and where writing is considered a specialisation. And where code writing is done with the expectation of serving the reader." Yeah, I can understand that as a good point. Still, as a person who was teaching Lit at a university for 8 years of my life, the idea that writing is the mantle of a special class and that reading is enough for the masses seems Writing (code / music / language) is easy enough that I'm not understanding why you wouldn't teach it to folks even if they can't do it at the same level as the texts they are capable of reading. Anyhow, best of luck with your ukulele experiments :D

cturner 10y ago

You make a good point. There's lots of accomplished musicians who never learn to read. And some "full-stack" musicians like yourself who start with tabs or similar, and who come to writing earlier than reading. I think several of the Beatles never bothered to learn western notation. My analogy has some problems. Still, I think it's interesting to consider the real possibility of a future where code-reading is a mainstream skill, and where writing is considered a specialisation. And where code writing is done with the expectation of serving the reader. I've started to mess with figured bass recently. I have an old ukulele and am seeing if I can fit some lute songs to it, and get used to taking my finger patterns from those marks. Kind of a step up from tabs.

scarecrowbob 10y ago
" think it's interesting to consider the real possibility of a future where code-reading is a mainstream skill, and where writing is considered a specialisation. And where code writing is done with the expectation of serving the reader." Yeah, I can understand that as a good point. Still, as a person who was teaching Lit at a university for 8 years of my life, the idea that writing is the mantle of a special class and that reading is enough for the masses seems Writing (code / music / language) is easy enough that I'm not understanding why you wouldn't teach it to folks even if they can't do it at the same level as the texts they are capable of reading. Anyhow, best of luck with your ukulele experiments :D