Mock Turtle Soup

Pencil marks and comments

I've had this one on the back burner for ages because I thought it was too obscure to post, but now Robert Chatley has written up a conversation we had when we bumped into each other at an orchestra rehearsal. Thanks Robert.

I was moaning (my core competence) about my sheet music which had been covered to the point of illegibility in pencil marks, most of which just emphasised what was already in the music. From the earliest lessons, instrumentalists are taught to mark their music in pencil with the everything their teacher or conductor tells them, so they won't forget in performance. For years, I carried 2B pencils everywhere to make sure I captured every last nuance. Then one day at music college, a tutor brought in the some sheet music from the New York Philharmonic's library, it might even have dated back to Mahler. They were clean! An occasional note that one conductor liked to do something unusual here, but that was it. Of course! The music's already there, just play what it says. My consumption of pencil lead dropped immediately.

The (kinda) relevant point is that this music was used by masters who knew what they were doing and didn't need to remind themselves all the time. Trainees and students are taught to mark up the parts because they don't know what they're doing. In software school, we're taught to comment everything so we don't forget what we did. In neither case, does anyone teach you when to grow up and stop commenting. I'm sure there are parallels in other disciplines.

Thinking further, much of what really great code I've seen has had very little commentary, just the occasional hint when something unusual is happening. The rest has been obvious to anyone who was skilled enough and understood the domain.

Posted by stevef at February 13, 2006 11:26 PM