Music and Programming — Part 2

Part 1 was about my background and, thus, how what I’m coming to see would even be possible. Part 2… let’s dive in.

First, I’d like to relate the three languages I’ve been studying to something anyone non-musical or musical and musically-illiterate or -literate can understand: their own body. The following can be described by this breakdown: Programming Language — Purpose — Human Form Equivalent.

HTML — structure/content — Skeleton

CSS — design/layout/style — Flesh

JavaScript — scripting/action/interaction— Speech & Body Movement

There is, of course, much more to all of these languages, but I’d say it roughly equates in this manner. It will be interesting to see how Ruby on Rails fits into this, but I haven’t begun learning it yet, so I can’t offer my thoughts on it. I’m not going to take this to the nth degree at the moment — maybe in a future post — but for now… why might this realization, as is, be important?

For one, it gives some perspective on learning multiple programming languages. No single language, to my knowledge, does it all, so you have to realize that you’re learning a piece of the puzzle in the context of the whole puzzle. Whatever language isn’t going to solve the whole puzzle, unless it truly is “the last piece of the puzzle”, but something I’ve found is that when you get that part of the puzzle working, it highlights a… not necessarily a flaw, but something you want to give a second look at or in my case, it might reveal an actual flaw in another part of the code — JavaScript revealing that your pictures when asked to be placed via a click in boxes — Tic-Tac-Toe — don’t automatically re-size, which is a CSS problem from my understanding.

Another reason I see this is as important is it helps delineate the purpose of each language by attaching it to something that’s easier to conceptualize. You might ask yourself what needs to be done to improve this or to build upon it, and upon realizing what it is that needs to be done, you know precisely which language is going to enable that.

I’m sure if I thought about it there are more reasons, but, for now, just 2 will suffice. So what about music? It really isn’t necessary to further this into conceptualizing it in musical terms, but I will in my next post. Why? Simple. It’s what I relate to and it might help some would-be-programmer-but-currently-musician try their hand at this as well as the fact that I understand music and how it works better than I understand the functioning of my own body. Sometimes my ideas seem farfetched to even me, but I’ll be expanding on everything, so hopefully over time… everything will come full circle. May have to re-write some. We’ll see.

Over and out!