[ternaryoperator]

I find that there is a huge cross-over between programming and music. IIRC, someone told me years ago, that the most common non-CS degree among programmers was music. I can't verify it, but my experience does not belie it either.

[mettamage]

I haven't seen that in The Netherlands, where I studied. But I did meet some fellow guitar players during my degree :)

Music and programming have a couple of things in common. The most important thing being: the act of creating something. Anyone who's a creator at heart will be interested by many endeavours that allow you to create. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if there's also a disproportionate amount of woodworkers among software engineers (as opposed to among laywers, for example).

The thing is, not every programmer is a programmer because he/she wants to create. There are other aspects to programming that might be interesting to some.

[kucing]

Your point about the commonality is "the act of creating something" is really touching. I really value the character to being "brave" to get creative, and also knowing that you can do/make/change things to the way you want / make it better.

I can see how it relates to various "creation" activities like cooking, painting, electronics/arduino,film-making, or even open-discussion/forum in general (creating community through participation).

[golemarms]

Most common non-STEM degree maybe. I'm sure there are a lot more EE/ physics/ math grads working as programmers than music grads.

[dpwm]

One of the more surprising combos at university was Physics and Music. That was the degree, and the numbers were similar to those doing Computational Physics.

[golemarms]

Imperial College actually used to offer a BSc Physics and Music Performance course[1] (it was suspended recently). This is notable because dual majors, even between similar/adjacent academic fields, are rare for UK undergraduate degrees.

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/courses/physics-departme...

[P_I_Staker]

If you don't purely do piano and do synthesizers, and write music with DAWs, there's even more crossover. You "program" drums/synths. That's literally what they call it, even though it's conceptually somewhat different. I got into it only to realize it's very similar to "work".