[sethhochberg]

The pattern recognition (and muscle memory that comes with it) is a huge difference between sight-reading music and programming, IMO.

I'm sure if we tried hard enough we could come up with a pretty good analogy between data structures / algorithms and scales / arpeggios / etc... but I've never felt quite the same when recognizing a familiarish algorithm in code as I would when sight-reading some music and having my fingers perform the right kind of movements out of almost unconscious muscle memory.