[cedws]

I would argue that taste is the ability to reason about one's own preferences.

A person who doesn't consider themself to have a taste in music and listens casually won't really be able to reason about why they like the music they do other than "I like the band" or "I like the song."

A person with taste in music is going to have listened to a larger variety, be able to speak passionately about it, and justify why they like and dislike particular music.

One is a boneheaded consumer, one is a fanatic.

Similarly with wine, you can't claim you've got taste when you've been drinking only red your whole life.

[SpicyUme]

I struggle with the music one. I listen to a lot of different music, used see live music at least once a week, and have some strong opinions. I still struggle to explain music to others or why I enjoy certain artists/songs.

It is like the details don't register in a usable way, where one of my good friends will tell me he likes a band because of the guitar tone or the drummer's technique or something else that I struggle to explain or even pick out of the music. I wish I could explain my preference better.

[hammock]

What music do you listen to?

[weitendorf]

Software is a bit different from music or wine because taste can mean “has the right function and attention to detail and aesthetic and interface and data model and conforms to my expectations and has a certain kind of API and has documentation with actual examples and uses the right JavaScript framework and”, whereas taste in wine can mean “has a blend of flavors that I particularly like” and taste in music can mean “pushes the boundaries of its genre and introduces genuinely new sounds”. Most but not all of what we want out of software is about function and utility and intuitive UX.

But wine and music and other subjective consumption-hobbies that enable snobbery are much less grounded in practicality and tend to become arenas for novelty/pure experimentation (charitably) or countersignaling and identity-building (uncharitably). So you end up with situations where the people who “have good taste” consistently associate themselves with music that sounds legitimately bad to regular listeners or never gets popular enough to be recognizable because it’s about being better than casual music listeners more than it is about the music to them. Or, proclaiming that no taste preferences for icecream products are worthy of respect unless they come from someone that regularly consumes pistachio ice cream - it’s not about the ice cream to them.

That’s why we can say “this UI needs to be collapsible and expanded by default” about software - we want it to be a certain way. The type of people who relish in their taste in music and ice cream don’t tend to say things like “maybe cut the bridge 10 seconds and add some kind of duet with reverb” or “it used too much nitrate fertilizer for loamy soil and ended up kind of woody (for ice cream)” because they want themselves to be a certain way.

[sagarm]

There's plenty of room for creativity, and therefore taste, when developing software that meets functional requirements.

[weitendorf]

I don’t dispute that. What I’m saying is that functional and even non-functional taste in software tends to be grounded in how it can more effectively serve our needs. In a way that’s actually a more profound kind of creativity and taste than something that tries to just look cool.

OTOH music and anything else snob-adjacent aren’t grounded in serving our direct needs to some other end the same way software tends to be, so to them “taste” could be reducible to just a favorite flavor or becomes a kind of status/value/oneupmanship. The products are consumed directly as ends unto themselves so people who have strong opinions on their comparative tastefulness care about that for different reasons than they do software.

[hug]

Taste is fashion, baby.

Taste has nothing to do with your awareness of your preference, and cannot exist in a social vacuum.

Taste has everything to do with others opinions of your preference: If your preferences, on display, are enough to bring many others to agree that your preferences are similar to their preferences, you have good taste. If your preferences, when encountered, are enough to bring others preferences into alignment with yours, you have excellent taste. If you can recognise what is the new hotness before anyone else does, you have even better taste. You don't have to be able to justify it, you just have to know it.

You don't need to be aware of this to be happening. You can have incredible taste while just sitting around and doing your own thing.

You can have incredible taste in only red wine without ever tasting white. You can have good taste in only hip-hop and not jazz, or in impressionist art and not abstract expressionism, or any other number of things.

If I know that your recommendation for a category is going to be good, then I know you have good taste.

[Nicook]

no, taste is ability to evaluate. You can still consume trash even if you have taste.