A society of jazz musicians would look a lot more foreign to us than one of software engineers. ;)

Oddly enough since I'm both a programmer and a jazz musician, I've noticed some interesting parallels. In both cases the practitioners come from all walks of life, and many of them either bailed out of the mainstream education system, or had a negative experience with it. For this reason you have people with music degrees sharing the bandstand with those who learned by doing. I'm halfway between those camps, having taken classical music lessons through high school but learning jazz on my own.