> they seem to be caught up in silly exercises just to show off to other nerds. Jazz musicians literally so, and to a much more insidious degree than Haskeller

> they seem to be caught up in silly exercises just to show off to other nerds. Jazz musicians literally so, and to a much more insidious degree than Haskellers or mathematicians. That is-- jazz musicians fall prey to the tendency to fill time with content pulled directly from the exercises they used to gain proficiency on their instrument. These can be simple iterations that step through a sequence of pitches, enumerating through the degrees of the pentatonic scale, compulsively sequencing through patterns in an octatonic scale, etc. Worse, this tendency can strike old timers just as easily as newcomers. Coltrane famously began to normalize his improvised lines to patterns he'd practice that were straight out of Slonimsky's book of exercise patterns. To get a sense of how annoying this can be even to jazz insiders-- imagine a math paper written by five researches. They read the paper aloud at a conference, and when one of them gets to the summation symbol, they immediately explain to the audience: "So for example, here you'd add one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and so forth..." As each researcher reads their section of the paper, they do this, incessantly, for every symbol that can possibly be explained with sequences of numbers.