Interesting side-topic: how many hackers out there are also musicians, and what do you play? I started playing violin when I was 2, but haven't played so much since leaving college. Maybe we could get a quartet together or something... you know, "I'm starting a hacker quartet, BUT I'm still going to work on my startup" :)

Violin was my first instrument, but I've mostly played guitar for the past ten years or so. I guess I was a musician long before I was a hacker, and I see a lot of similarities between the two - the variety of things you can do, the amount of time it takes to become decent at either, etc.

Surprisingly enough I've never tried to bring the two together. Signal modelling/processing software...talk about 'hard problems'!

I took a similar path - violin for 9 years, then switched to guitar when I was about 16 (to be cool, of course). I didn't completely drop the violin, but guitar was my main instrument for the later part of high school. But then I picked the violin up again for All States my senior year, and kept doing it for college. Surprisingly it's violin that stuck - I still play a couple times a week, while I haven't touched my guitar in close to a year.

I've also dabbled in a bunch of other instruments - 3 years of clarinet in middle school, enough viola to play and (barely) read music, picked up a fife and tin whistle in Williamsburg, reasonably fluent on bass guitar, and I've been trying to teach myself piano over the past couple years, with only slight success.

A friend of mine was an electrical engineer and a drummer. For a senior project he made some electronic drums. Bessel functions are hard :)

I play the drums and I played snare drum in high school marching band. I wish I owned an electronic drum set, I'd enjoy writing some beats sometimes.

:-) Piano and voice for me, but the latter not very well. One of the reasons I like Douglas Hofstadter is his intertwining of computers and music.

Piano and voice. I played saxaphone in high school and studied theory in college.

This is the best article to come out of the switch to hacker news yet. _exactly_ what I'd read all day long, time permitting.

You might find this book interesting:

http://www.amazon.com/Equal-Temperament-Ruined-Harmony-Shoul...

Conversationally written and accurate (so far as I was able to tell, I only had time to read a few chapters)

I think what attracted me to the fiddle was a) the belief that the goal was to expend as little effort as possible, and b) it had very few parts.

I think these are same things I look for in programming languages. Maximum expressibility with a minimum of interference.

The violin is the Lisp of musical instruments.

(Or, Lisp is the violin of programming languages.)

Not having frets doesn't help, either.

The hardest part of learning to play (and to master) the violin is definitely learning how to use the bow. Actually learning how to play in tune is hard as well. It's just hard.

Yeah, I was surprised that the article didn't even mention intonation. That deserves some lip service at least.

I play several instruments, but it's the violin playing that goes rusty quickest. Past a certain stage, you can get out of practice with just one or two weeks of neglect.

the article deals only with the mechanics but surprisingly, omits the really hard part - getting emotion to be depicted in the violin tone. that's why I gave up the violin after 3 years.