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Saturday, 17 May 2003

Between the piano and C++ ::

Mark Bernstein comments on a New York Times piece: “The distance between the paintbrush and programming in C++ is that, with a brush, you can rationalize mistakes. That’s all. The distance between the piano and C++ is.... what, precisely? Dexterity, I suppose.”

For me, the distance is as small as I can make it, which is about 3 feet, both at home and work. A long compile? OK, I can play!

Perhaps this is just the sampling bias of having worked in music software for 18 years, but among the programmers I’ve worked with, almost all are musical, some extraordinarily so. And the best programmers are as likely to have university degrees in the liberal arts as in engineering. My dad liked to tell his Cornell history students that his elder two sons, both Cornell English majors, are now successful programmers. How is that so? He’d say something about how a liberal arts education helps one learn to think critically. I remember reading something in the mid-80's about a correlation between aptitudes for programming and music. And any programmer knows that no matter how much engineering “discipline” we apply (not a bad thing), creating huge, intricate systems in maintainable, debuggable ways feels more like an art than science. Why else would we have Murphy’s Laws of Programming that include darkly humorous observations like, “If any program is useful, it will have to be changed,” and “Anything can be made to work if you fiddle with it long enough.”

Another observation I’d make about the connection between music and technology is that advances in instrument design have long inspired composers. Bach was a something of a math geek; see his well-tempered system. I didn’t know until I read that, that it is not the same as today’s equal temperament (in which there’s at least one factual error; the first example has F and C dramatically out of tune in the key of D compared to the key of C—but he’s comparing F/F# and C/C#!). But in any case, all such tuning systems are compromises to make all 24 major and minor keys available, making adjustments so that some intervals, such as fifths, are pure in some keys, and not in others. Equal temperament simply makes all intervals in all keys precisely the same, sounding equally good/bad. (A perfect fifth has a ratio of 1.5; an equal tempered fifth 1.4983—2 to the 7/12th power).

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