The concluding question—"What if programming notation were more like music notation?"—is an interesting one. Music notation achieves a pretty impressive informa

The concluding question—"What if programming notation were more like music notation?"—is an interesting one. Music notation achieves a pretty impressive information density when you think about it. And it offers an interesting way of describing concurrent processes. (edit: I should say it offers an interesting way of describing parallel processes) I suppose it would be closest to a declarative programming paradigm? But there are going to be some inevitable problems when drawing comparisons to programming languages. One of which is that music notation occupies a kind of hybid position between a natural language and a machine language. Certain aspects of notation like pitch and rhythm are totally unambiguous (at least in the abstract) but others (volume, timbre, attack, phrasing) are more connotational and thus up to performer interpretation. Then there's something like tempo which may be a mixture of both: a metronome mark is unambiguous but an accelerando isn't. Also, although I agree that "people learn to read it fluently with a little training," I don't think it follows that they can write it correctly with a little training. It's actually an enormously subtle, complex mode of expression. Take just one example: enharmonic spelling. Even in a purely diatonic harmonic context, understanding when to use a g-sharp versus and a-flat requires a pretty extensive understanding of music theory. Take a bit of time to peruse something like Gardner Read's "Music Notation: A Manual of Modern Practice" with its 400+ pages detailing all the edge cases and tiny details and you'll see just how hard it can be to notate music properly.