[club_tropical]

Thank you, your comment helps me sharpen my thought.

1) Yes, you definitely need to know Latin to appreciate the Aeneid, I agree with this.

2) It is a comparatively low bar though. Ability to write Hamlet is quite a step up from ability to read it. So a floor level of skill is absolutely necessary to even “unlock” the taste.

3) There are also returns to additional knowledge/skill for a while. The better your English is, or the more cultural references you know, the better your appreciation of Hamlet might be. You “unlock” less dramatic but still new taste buds.

4) I do think, however, that my OG point largely holds: your acquisition of baseline knowledge/skills doesn’t instill taste so much as unlock it. In other words, among people who speak English, all but the aforementioned seething subset will agree that Shakespeare is great and among people with some algo thinking, all will think elegant code is elegant.

5) Because the skill to unlock taste is so much less than the skill to produce, I agree with the article that they are basically orthogonal.