You're implying that there's a *more* appropriate forum somewhere for discussing analogies between music composition and programming languages? If so, I'd like to know what it is!
Yes, music and programming languages are ultimately phenomena of our human brains/minds. Therefore, the expression of music or algorithms touch as much mathematics as they touch the field of philosophy (and here the philosophy of the mind). Sometimes there are interesting posts in comp.ai.philosophy and attempts to discuss the semantics in Mozart or Beethoven's style: http://groups.google.de/groups/search?hl=de&q=beethoven+mozart+comparison
I've been thinking about this. Are there really any programmers who are like Mozart in the way you describe?
No, and I think Dijkstra perception is a bit flawed with respect to Mozart's compositions. Certainly, there are very strong rewarding mechanisms in the brain which can be activated by special circumstances and allow to develop special capabilities (Feynman spoke about falling in love with an idea). But it is not highly desirable for a society to have every member to develop radical new idea's or skills. A species would quickly stop to reproduce if everyone would be sitting in a room thinking about a certain abstract subject.
Whereas it's conceivable to imagine somebody writing a piece of music that way, or a poem.
I think in general it is underestimated how rare such moments of divine inspiration are in reality. There is this nice speech by Wislawa Szymborska about the difficulties of inspiration in poetry (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/index.html).... and also the late Beethoven explains this in his music: Have a listening to the 3rd movement of his op.106. In my view, he explains about the suffering of a lonely genius, and then starts laughing about it because our own nature changes all the time, and that there is almost no way to control these changes, nor on time that passed away or predicting times to come, neither a judgement whether he is happy or not with this fact of life- I find it a very powerful observation on how learning works. ___________________________________________________________ Telefonate ohne weitere Kosten vom PC zum PC: http://messenger.yahoo.de