[throwawaymath]

> This is fantasy. You're comparing the average programmer to musical savants? What?

They didn't describe a musical savant. They described someone who learned to play the guitar without any background in music theory. The analogy was not someone playing a chord without knowing the name of the chord, it was someone playing a chord progression without knowing the formal musical basis for that progression.

That kind of intuition is very common in guitarists, and I thought the analogy was rather apt.

[0xFACEFEED]

> They described someone who learned to play the guitar without any background in music theory.

I have no idea what guitarists and other musicians you know. I know quite a few and they've had to put in serious work on music theory (most from a young age). Many also started out with instruments like early piano lessons and transitioned to guitar.

It's quite literally a language you need to learn (memorize); kinda like maths actually. Some things may seems intuitive but only savants can compose actual music without training in music theory.

[agentwiggles]

I would guess that the _vast_ majority of guitarists learn that "G D Em C" sounds good _long_ before they understand that it's an I V vi IV progression. I started off playing guitar with three open string power chords, and I didn't have any understanding of theory for years of playing.

[throwawaymath]

No one is talking about composing music without a classical background. We're talking about playing music without the background.

Composing music is to playing a chord progression as writing a naive algorithm implementation is to designing an optimal algorithm.