I probably should have made myself clearer, but I was referring to the modern standard of notation, which if I am not mistaken, is indeed largely the same as wh

I probably should have made myself clearer, but I was referring to the modern standard of notation, which if I am not mistaken, is indeed largely the same as what you would find dating back to the 17th-18th centuries, i.e. several hundred years ago. A more instructive comparison, in this regard, would be between the Messiaen you linked and Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. Yes, I'm familiar with the experimentation with notation of 20th century composers such as Xenakis, Cage, Stockhausen, etc, but they're beside the point (no offense to you or Xenakis, I happen to like his work). Their music is obscure and inaccessible to a great deal of Westerners, even many of those who could ordinarily be considered "musically literate", and few of these modern, experimental forms of notation, to my knowledge, have caught on in a way that's comparable to the popularity of even an "obscure" or "academic" computer language such as Haskell. There have been and always will be exceptions, not to mention music that falls outside the realm of Western tradition entirely, but you have to admit that the umbrella of expression that fits the modern standard of notation is pretty wide. The point to take away, I think, is that once a standard came into common use that allowed composers to convey enough relevant information about the music they were creating, innovation in notation became a lot less important, for quite a long time. By a similar token, while English has of course been constantly evolving throughout its history, as all languages do, standard English orthography hasn't changed much in the last few hundred years either. You don't need a new kind of staff or notehead to represent chromaticism vs. baroque counterpoint, any more than you need new letters of the alphabet in order to write words and phrases that no one has ever heard before, in dialects that didn't exist at the time Walt Whitman wrote "Leaves of Grass", or what have you. As long as you're talking about notes over the chromatic scale, time and key signatures, common rhythmic subdivisions, and so on, you can notate whatever it is you like. In any case, the point I was making earlier in the thread is that this seems fairly different from the development of computer languages, and I think that a lot of it has to do with the inherent nature of computer languages as tools of abstraction that extend beyond the merely representational. Hence the comparison with musical instruments – in my view, code is more like a hammer than it is a book.