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Comment by daviddaviddavid | Hacker News Reader

I suffer from an interesting variant of OP's condition: I'm good at algorithms but I don't know their names and I don't really have a storehouse of them in my head.

So basically, I often write code that a CS grad would look at and say "Hey, that's the visitor pattern." and I'm like "Oh... cool!".

I'm the same way with music: I play jazz professionally and I'm an "ear player"... I have no technical vocab to describe what I'm doing but I get along just fine.

I'm sure knowing these things more formally would help but honestly, I think having good intuitions can take you pretty far.

Also, my recommendation for honing problem solving chops:

https://sites.google.com/site/prologsite/prolog-problems

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By the way, knowing those OOP patterns doesn't have much to do with algorithms.

The ear player is the perfect analogy, but there's no reason why you can't go and learn music theory after the fact. In fact, it would help you to explain the music to others, and to see patterns. The power of giving a name to a thing is encapsulation and abstraction, so I would propose that an ear-player and an ear-programmer would be more likely to get stuck in the gutter of whatever they're doing and pigeonhole themselves.

Regarding getting stuck in a gutter, in music I find it's exactly the opposite. The musician who has a stockpile of pre-packaged phrases/idioms/licks tends to sound very predictable.

This is especially problematic in jazz, where a premium is placed on improvisation/creativity. There's real sense in which the very idea of having a pre-packaged phrase is totally antithetical to improvisation.

Also, pre-packaged ideas in music tend to get ingrained at the muscular level. The last thing you want to happen is for your hands to start running the show.

I do realize however that the very best musicians (and programmers!) probably have a huge arsenal of ideas AND deploy them tastefully.

Yes, a person who is great at ear-playing could be made better if they can analyze why a thing sounds good, the in-the-moment improvisation flow doesn't give you enough time to really think about what you're doing anyway, but before and after, you can strategize. They're two separate thought-processes that complement each other, imo, as it is with programming. A lot of times I find I can just flow and write code, but there is much room for thoughtful refactoring after the fact. Experience, theory, named concepts and systematic analysis gives you tools to really improve.

You don't think good jazz players know their chord scales, though?

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