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Comment by bongodongobob | Hacker News Reader

Is it useful to learn bagpipes? I guess learning for its own sake is good, but if you want to join a band, guitar or keyboards are going to be a better bet and learning bagpipes first isn't going to do much for you.

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Do bagpipes explain the mystery of sand performing calculations and taking actions? Do they give you an intuition for connecting how CPUs and memory accesses and cache hierarchies work with high level code, in such a way that you can start to understand why one version of code might be faster or slower than another?

If you can't see through field accesses and function calls to memory indirections, anything you might read about how TLBs and caches and branch prediction work doesn't connect to much.

Guess what, almost no one knows how to program in assembly and yet everything is working out pretty good.

I can say the performance of Windows Explorer lately, compared to how it was in Windows NT, does not impress me.

If a guitar was an abstraction layer that was implemented by low-level bagpipes then a) that would be awesome and b) guitar players would find their guitar playing to benefit from bagpipe lessons. At the very least they'd be able to understand and maintain their guitar better.

The connection is that they both play notes. You can play the same songs on both but no one wants to hear bagpipes.

You can't play most of the same songs on both. Bagpipes (well, most forms of bagpipe, there are dozens, but unqualified people tend to mean the Scottish "Great Highland Bagpipe") are a diatonic instrument playing a just-intonation scale tuned to not cause discordant notes with their own drones, while guitars are a chromatic instrument fretted to play an equal-tempered intonation. The GHB plays in something rather close to the modern Mixolidian A mode with an augmented 4th, not any of the major or minor keys of modern Western music. The GHB and the guitar are entirely incompatible instruments, unless you're talking about a classical guitar with tied-on gut frets that could be replaced to allow playing the GHB scale.

I have no idea what any of that means, but I love the deep knowledge that it expresses :-)

I'll try to simplify: you can't readily adjust the tuning of a bagpipe; it's tuned in a way that would make it sound horribly dissonant against other instruments (for important music-theory reasons); and it doesn't even play all the notes, so you can't play in all the major and minor keys of Western (== European from c. 1580 onward + American) music tradition - you're stuck with scales that only make sense for the genre of music that's specifically written for the instrument.

To clarify in case of insult: by "but unqualified" I mean "but, without qualification as to which type of bagpipe". I had no intention to insinuate that "unqualified people" are the only ones who talk about the Scottish Great Highland Bagpipe! I myself will say that I "play the bagpipes" or "am a bagpiper" when referring to the GHB, even though I also play Ceilidh pipes sometimes (a different, smaller sort of Scottish bagpipe with a different drone tuning). I don't play the Irish Uillean Pipes, Galician Gaita, Northumbrian Smallpipes, any of the German, French, Italian, Greek, or other sort of bagpipes. Unqualified, bagpipe usually means Great Highland Bagpipe.

What you're trying to say is that assembly is like the bagpipes and impractical. What I'm trying to say is that's a terrible metaphor because the main reason to learn assembly is understanding what your non-assembly code is actually executed as.

Learning the accordion didn't hurt Weird Al's career, nor did using the flute hurt Ian Anderson (lead vocalist and flutist of Jethro Tull).

These are edge cases. Way to miss the point.

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