[contrast]

You were literally just saying that people who learn to play an instrument and express themselves through music, if they learned how to read, were no more musicians than some who can’t actually program is a programmer.

I suppose you can argue it’s just an opinion, so therefore while it might sound condescending, arrogant and profoundly self-centred, it isn’t wrong as such. The problem with that is it wasn’t just an opinion, it was an argument. I would say that learning to become a concert pianist it a completely different thing to typing in programs from magazines, and so you are very much wrong to say that it is.

[tobr]

I have absolutely not said that if you learn how to read a score you’re not a musician. I compared learning to play an instrument by first learning to read a score to learning to program by first learning to type in a program accurately from a magazine. The similarity is that you’re trying to learn something that, while hard to master, can very quickly be fun and creative, but first you decided to learn to do a different thing that is just as hard and very tedious and only tangentially relevant. For a lot of learners, it’s likely to be a turn-off, or a distraction.

Concert pianist are not beginners, and they have chosen to focus on the type of repertoire that is completely centered around sheet music, so they are way, way outside where this analogy makes sense.