RE: RPG IV and CF-spec "keep it IBM"(music, music, music)

It's more than just the ratios that govern the degrees of the scale and
harmonics.  A lot of music involves the idea of invariance under
transformation.  Math, on the other hand, has a strong aesthetic component.
IMHO the kind of intuition that produces elegant mathematical proofs,
interesting music, and good code is the same thing.

I'm guessing that most people who are good at musical stuff like
transposition and chord substitution, even if they don't know how they do it
at the conscious level, could learn to program well.

I've had too much coffee this AM.  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: boldt@ca.ibm.com [mailto:boldt@ca.ibm.com]
> Sent: Friday, August 06, 1999 5:45 AM
> To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
> Subject: Re: RPG IV and CF-spec "keep it IBM"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Bruce wrote:
> >Hans: Music IS mathematics, an octave, a fifth, etc, are just ratios.
> >
> >I would recommend both "e: The Story of a Number" by Eli Maor and
> >"Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas 
> Hofstadter for
> >further exploring these relationships.
> 
> Sure, at a basic level music is just ratios.  My point is that
> a sense of aesthetics, which musicians and other artists
> obviously have, is a tremendous advantage when doing computer
> programming.  But does a musician need to understand the
> underlying mathematics in order to make pleasing music?
> Likewise, does a programmer need to understand computability
> theory in order to write good programs?  In both cases, the
> most important thing is aptitude, but that alone doesn't make
> one a good artist or a good programmer.
> 
> BTW, I did read GEB, shortly after it was published 19 years
> ago.  In retrospect, it seems a bit long-winded.  I don't
> know if I could find the time to read it again these days.
> 
> Cheers!  Hans
> 
> Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com
> 
> 
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