t’s widely reported that many coders have musical backgrounds. There are articles, posts written about this especial relationship. It appears that most coders are either musicians or were at one point.

Some Similarities

Both the coders & musicians lead solitary life styles spend most of their time practicing their crafts. Both skills require self-discipline and can also be self taught. In a 2019 Stackoverflow developer survey showed that more than 85% of the developers were self-taught at least in language or framework.

There seems to be a high correlation between musical ability and reasoning skills. It has to do with recognizing and manipulating patterns. That happens in music and in programming.

Terry Skwarek, Director of SharePoint administration
DePaul University (quoted from Huff Post)

Learning to code is hard just like learning to music or sports. They require long-term commitment of learning & practicing. The following answer by Aston Motes, quoted from Forbes Quora explains why coders are also musicians.

• Great musicians and great software engineers both come from a place of initial interest plus a whole lot of practice! There’s really no way around putting in the hours to get good at what you do.
• Whether it’s music or software, it’s hard to get in so many hours honing your craft without having some sort of deep enjoyment for the work, and so you’ll see practitioners of both doing a lot without actually being paid for it. In software we call it Open Source, and in music it’s a Jam Session.
• The reward for all that hard work for both software engineers and musicians is often a personal sense of success more so than a public one. When you finally master some tricky software technique like monads, or when you finally master some tricky musical technique like circular breathing, the world doesn’t really stand up and applaud. But you know you’re awesome.

Content of this note was adopted from Programmers And Musicians Have More In Common Than You Think : Forbes Quora. Cover photo by Corey Young on Unsplash