The sixth largest, more likely. US dollar declined enough last year that Japan and the UK probably surpassed California again. And India is also getting close to California.
I can confirm this. Fairly conservative family guy, love it here in OC. Not sure if due to balanced politics or apathy to politics but it’s awesome. After leaving the Seattle area where I was getting hostility from randoms on the street just for driving a Tesla, I feel at home here.
> “I think Ford’s position is very reasonable. We’re really a big advocate for the ability to repair a vehicle, but it has to be done at a reasonable cost, and—”
> Freep’s journalist then jumped in with the same question I would have wanted to ask: “But you don’t want people repairing their own vehicles?”
> Farley’s reply: “No, that’s, that’s fine, not for warranty work, though. These are very complicated cars, and we don’t think that’s safe, for many of the repairs on our vehicles, someone at home like myself could never do it. I have no problem working on a ’73 Bronco, but to work on a brand-new Bronco? I need all sorts of specialty tools. That’s something that, um, you know, we would put people’s lives at risk.”
if you're logged out of YouTube you get exposed to logged-out-of-youtube-core content. This is the content that is most addictive, brainrotting, and profitable to the billionaires with a stake in the situation. Just how it is.
Says who? I remember having one of those cassette adapters that was a tape that you'd stick in the tape drive, and you'd attach to the headphone jack of a portable CD player. Maybe I was poor, but cars had cassettes most of my youth, while people had CD players at home.
That's a good point. CD mastering was very dynamic until around the mid-90s, and that probably correlates with CD players becoming a standard option in cars.
Now, yes, but in the 90s/00s the alternative to CDs was cassette tapes, which were both inferior audio quality and took up more space. CD players in cars were a very desirable feature back then.
At my peak in the mid-00s I remember counting and finding I had just over 500 CDs in my car, almost all of which were MP3s burnt to playable CD-Rs laying in the passenger seat... the good old days. Nice thing about using CD-Rs is you didn't have to care about them getting scratched, either.
Cassettes were great, though. They could pile up, unprotected, in the center console or find their way under the seat and be fine. That pile might have everything from your mom's Vivaldi tape to the MC5 bootleg you got from your older brother.
Sick of listening to whatever's in the deck right now?
Just rummage through them without looking using the gear-shift hand and hold one up in an instant without taking eyes very far off the road. Upon finding one that's Good Enough For Right Now: Pop the old one out of the tape player with a ker-chunk and a blast of radio noise, and then quickly plunge its replacement into the empty hole -- all with muscle memory.
Frozen mist on the windshield on a cold morning? There's a cassette-shaped ice scraper right there in the dash. Take it out, use it to scrape the ice off the window, and put it back in. It still works.
CD-Rs helped a ton and I deliberately avoided CDs in cars until I was able to make CDs cheaply at home. But they were still delicate things in ways that tapes never were, they still skipped in ways that tapes never did, and their sonic improvements weren't very meaningful over the wind and road noise with the factory stereo of a malaise-era Chevrolet.
Compared to what? CDs that would skip on movement or scratch and skip worse? CD-R that would delaminate? Vinyl records? The continuous-loop abomination of 8-track?
Compact cassette tapes were profoundly robust compared to everything else.
They were never good in the car, merely tolerable without option. Early on they skipped, and they were always bigger than cassettes, more expensive, and significantly more fragile. The changer made them very expensive to boot.
Why most CD listening was done in the home, and cassettes held on for longer than expected.
Xbox seems to excel at all the benchmarks that measure platform success but it fails at every subjective metric: it's just ugly
the interface is ugly, the subscriptions are ugly, the specific way they tighten the vice on the consumer is ugly, the terms are ugly, the controller is ugly, the company is ugly, the branding and marketing is so ugly
Sony and Nintendo might be just as evil but they offer a comparatively beautiful product. Xbox 360 started out beautiful and ended ugly. Microsoft seemingly has an uglification fetish.
Including their ridiculous naming system. Referring to a playstation generation is easy, referring to an xbox generation past the 360 is incredibly difficult.
> Python 3.14.0 introduced a new incremental garbage collector. But reports of higher memory usage caused the Python team to revert the garbage collector changes in 3.14.5.
If they didn't have very good objective reasons the new GC is better, they never should have shipped it. If they do, they should not have reverted the change.
It's better in some ways (order-of-magnitude reductions in pause times were cited) but worse in other ways (higher peak memory usage). That the higher peak memory usage was catastrophic for some users only became apparent through post-release feedback.
They should have shipped it as an addon GC, not enabled by default. One could have turned it on with a command line switch or an env var, just like the Ruby JIT.
It's this sort of stuff that leaves me scratching my head why people like Python so much. I hear them say they prefer the syntax and personally I feel like that's such a small part of the holistic experience of working with any particular language. It's one of the reasons why I gave up on C++ years ago for .NET, the whole system of tooling in .NET has never left me feeling like I was pigeonholed into doing things in stupid, self-flagelating ways. Why should I use a language like C++ that doesn't provide a standard set of package management and build tools? Why should I use a language like Python that feels like it's being designed by amateurs?
I felt like the tooling in Racket, CLisp, and Java were similarly pragmatic and not either religiously devoted to some concept of "backwards compatibility" that I seriously doubt most people actually need, or "ease of use" that actually proves itself to be easy when you consider the not-happy-path of the beginner tutorials. Racket, I didn't continue just because the library ecosystem isn't mature enough to keep up with the latest in databases and other 3rd party services. Java I quit largely because of Oracle and some 2010s problems with stagnation. CLisp mostly because it was too hard to socialize. But never because I thought the core language and tooling were holding me back.
You are right the syntax is a small part of it, but it is more important than you say in this case because Python syntax is one of the things that makes it very readable.
Even if you dislike the direction Python is going in, a lot of what attracted people to Python in the first place is still there. The readability, the large standard library, the huge ecosystem. There are libraries and frameworks for everything: numerical stuff, web development, GUIs etc. Its actually a nice language in itself, just going in the wrong direction now.
If you look at it historically it was really good comparatively. If you compare it to the alternatives available 20 years ago it looks pretty good.
When people say they prefer 'the syntax', I think they usually mean a bit more than just that: at least a fair bit of this is semantics. Python provides a lot of features out of the box, and if you work superficially along the happy path, it is very easy to understand how these work and read code using them.
Take list comprehensions for example. It is mostly syntax: you can do virtually all list comprehensions with just a map and filter function. But the way that it is integrated and presents the code, makes is vastly easier to follow for most developers, which tilts the balancer in favor of doing away with loops and mutable state. Is it syntax that made them do so? Yes, maybe. But its the actual semantics that provide the value.
It's easy to start learning on, or prototype with, and then sometimes momentum just keeps it going. Also it may not really be the best at anything, but it's "pretty good" at just about everything. It's kind of like vanilla ice cream.
Packaging can be irritating although uv takes the sting out a bit.
You are right that outside of verbosity, once you get used to the syntax of a language, the value of one over the other kind of fades.
> Packaging can be irritating although uv takes the sting out a bit.
uv proves the OP’s point. Why couldn’t the core team and the core-adjacent PyPA make a tool as liked as uv, and why is the Python package manager uv written in Rust and not Python?
For the same reason GP posted and half the stdlib is written in C: Python is a language that is almost always good enough, but never really the best (and especially when it comes to performance of complex algorithms).
Because uv itself can fetch a Python distribution. If it's written in Python, it's quite a bit harder to distribute, assuming one of their goals is not to require an existing Python install.
> Why couldn’t the core team and the core-adjacent PyPA make a tool as liked as uv
Incredibly large backward-compatibility burdens [0], internal politics [1] and general institutional dysfunction (no footnote; if you're familiar then you need no explanation, and if you aren't then the less said the better). Nothing to do with Python as a language. Most of the important pieces to get uv-like performance are algorithmic choices, and most of the rest are available as built-in C code in the reference implementation [2].
(Edit: wait, I recognize your username. You should definitely know these sorts of things.)
> why is the Python package manager uv written in Rust and not Python?
Because that's the language that Astral devs like, and because installing Python itself is considered in scope for uv so there would be an intractable bootstrapping issue.
[0]: In particular, the entire model of `setup.py` defining metadata is certifiably insane, especially when you consider the projects that expect to feed that code to Setuptools at build time in order to figure out what version of Setuptools is needed at build time. But this legacy approach is seen as something that absolutely must be guaranteed to work for well beyond even now; even attempts to remove long-deprecated, minor aspects of that functionality end up breaking major projects, including ones that didn't even require a build step in the first place [3].
[1]: Most obviously, GvR not wanting to have anything to do with it when initially approached by the SciPy people in IIRC 2011, leading to the creation of Conda). But a lot of other things, too. The backwards-compatibility issues synergize with this; consider for example the architectural dumpster fire of Setuptools, and the timeline of distutils removal from the standard library.
Any claims that Python has a huge backwards compat mission go right out the window when you consider Python 3. 3 was a perfect chance to fix all of the major problems with Python, problems other languages have solved so there isn't even a need to invent things from scratch. They didn't and that's why the community is still split on adoption.
I have no idea what you're talking about. 3.x objectively did fix the major problems and was not particularly inventive in its approach. The fact that they didn't fix more things all at once — and the fact that they still received massive complaints about supposedly fixing too much — is the origin of that backwards compatibility mission. Actually talking to the devs for any significant length of time makes it clear how much lasting trauma was caused by the change, and how much that cemented pro-backwards-compatibility views. And the community has not been remotely "split on adoption" for years; hardly anyone publishes packages advertised as 2.x compatible any more (e.g. urllib3 gave up almost two years ago). But to the extent that there have been any holdouts at all, it's been people who want ancient systems to work, not people who think that not enough changed to merit upgrading.
Python 3 got very slow update and poor acceptance precisely because it DIDN'T fix major problems, it only tweaked around the edges of minor ones. So people stayed with Python 2 as long as possible. Here's a post from 2014 that I bookmarked and it explains things a decade+ later:
From the link: "You know why I'm not running python 3? Because it doesn't solve a single problem I have. It doesn't solve anyone's problems. It solves imaginary problems, while creating real problems."
Syntax really does matter more than you give it credit for. Were that not the case, I'd expect one Lisp or Scheme dialect or other to take Python's place. Outside of that counterfactual, Python's competition was stuff like Ruby, and it turned out that network effects were also pretty important.
> It's this sort of stuff that leaves me scratching my head why people like Python so much
Because of the libraries, not necessarily the language, which is also quite straightforward. For example we found a niche library that speaks the ISO-TP protocol in Python, which allows us to communicate with vehicle ECUs. That's why people also use C++, even tough I quite doubt it's because they like the language. Add to that that it's also heavily used in embedded programming. Yes, you could call a C/C++ library from another language, depending how well the language can do that.
I prefer Ruby, but Python probably has just about everything one would need. It's also great for data processing. We hardly have anything better than pandas, polars, numpy, scipy in other languages and that:s without even mentioning ML tooling.
Python is mostly about the “batteries included” standard library and what’s becoming nearly standard third party libs, being able to play around in the REPL,
The standard library is full of dead batteries. If the stdlib is so good, why does everyone install requests instead of using the stdlib http client? And why requests or something like it hasn't been adopted into stdlib after so many years of stability?
People mostly defer to requests because they do not track language development closely and because we are creatures of habit.
I try to avoid non-stdlib packages when stdlib will do a good job, but I received negative feedback from people who aren't aware of the updates and couldn't foresee supply-chain attacks.
The current standard library urllib is a refactoring of previous attempts from the 2.x standard library, and urllib.request is just a sub-package. It does not represent adoption of requests; requests builds on urllib3, which was created to fill in gaps in what the standard library provided, and named like that because the 2.x standard library had both a `urllib` and a `urllib2` as they struggled to figure it out.
For a long time, urllib had everything deprecated except for the parsing code which remained relevant as the upstream RFCs have not changed IIRC.
Urllib2 is now also gone and mostly replaced with urllib.request.
It should cover 99% of the use-cases one would use requests for — I am not sure how and why it matters that it is a subpackage and not a top-level package?
This is just a natural evolution of a widely used language where you have to be careful with backwards compatibility.
You are picking one of the weak points of the standard library and an unusually popular replacement (and AFAIK it is built on the standard library). I cannot think of many others that are widely used. Maybe lxml ?
A Python codebase might well use requests, but it will almost always also heavily use the standard library.
> “batteries included” standard library and what’s becoming nearly standard third party libs
Historically, the standard library made sense. And we're talking about a history that stretches back to before Internet connections were ubiquitous, to say nothing of connection speed.
Now the standard library is full of things that they refuse to remove because it would supposedly be too disruptive, but which they would never think of adding today if they weren't already there.
I think we would be a lot more musically verbal as a society if our musical notation had a more objective foundation in math and reason. For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C. We have a 12 note system with only 7 names for them; 12 names would make sense, and even 6 names would make sense, but 7?
We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.
Mapping twelve letters onto a piano keyboard would then look something like this:
B D G I K
A C EF H J LA
Which means an A major scale in this notation would be ACEFHJLA, which is actually less intuitive than understanding the circle of fifths etc. and arriving at ABC#DEF#G#A (to use this universe's notation)
To +1 the "no objective foundation": browse music theory research a bit! There's a ton of caveats and poor-sounding fits and whatnot for literally every approach, and there's endless discussion of it. E.g. have a MinutePhysics take on how the common 12 note western scale falls apart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hqm0dYKUx4
(maybe to clarify: there are objective aspects, in that sound is measurable. but there is nothing like a "grand unified theory" that covers all music, nor are roughly any of the popular ones internally consistent - it's far, far too varied for that, and physics often doesn't allow the desired consistency, causing more variety)
In your traditional system, if you want to play something a step up, you have to actually think about it; which notes will now become sharps, which won't, etc.
In my system (A though L, or more simply, 1 through 12), you simply add 2 to each note. It's easier to work about and isn't as rigidly defined by the culture it came from.
You just described https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-tone_scale. Nothing stopping anyone from writing and playing music in such a scale, but it won't help you with nearly all the music you are likely to be familiar with.
Sure, if path dependency was were not a thing, this might make more sense. But it takes an extraordinary amount of time to really get good at music and you don't want to be the only person who speaks a completely different language to the people around you. So it makes sense to stick with what everybody speaks.
I skimmed the article but the parallel did not seem obvious to me. I play 'string' instruments (bass guitar, guitar, open tuned resonators) but I guess my approach is fairly standard - I read music but don't site read real-time very well. But When I "think" about music it's the same way most western musicians think about music (I assume) and that's diatonically in relation to the major scale as a reference point.
Do you have much experience reading musical notation?
I've found that engineer types tend to immediately bristle at the weird parts of how notes are named because the system seems really kludgy until you realize that there's actually a utility in the weirdness - namely, that scale patterns look roughly similar in any given key and so sight reading is counterintuitively easier with the current system than it would be in a system which assigned a different position on the staff (or a different name) to each note.
Furthermore - we have seven note names because there are seven notes in the major scale, so changing this count would definitely not make sense.
To be clear there are definitely warts in the current system, lots of confusing stuff around enharmonics. But there's definitely babies in the bathwater and any alternate system would not want to toss them out.
There's also a huge amount of math behind music that is fascinating.
The first-approximation engineer realization about music (which I suspect the GP is going off of) is "okay, there are 12 notes in the chromatic scale, each octave doubles frequency, therefore the frequency ratio between two adjacent notes is the 12th root of 2 and we should just have 12 names for the notes". This is what's called an "equal-tempered scale"; the gap between each note is the same ratio, and you have a simple geometric progression upwards.
Except we don't actually have an equal-tempered scale. If you try to play on an equal-tempered scale, it'll sound subtly "off", and certain chords will result in "beats" (pulsing) where the frequency ratios are off just enough to cause an unpleasant modulation in loudness.
The modern diatonic scale is based on the circle-of-5ths [1], where the fundamental ratio is the 5th at 3/2 the frequency. It works like this because now chords are an even multiple of frequencies, while you would get an irrational number with the equal-tempered scale. Going up from the root (C), the next 5th up is G at a ratio of 3/2. Then you go up to D (9/4); when you reduce this to lowest terms because you've ascended a full octave, it gives a ratio of 9/8, which is one whole tone above. Next 5th up is A (27/16), which is the ratio in frequencies of a 6th. And then you get E (81 / 32 = 81/64), a major 3rd. And so on. The frequency ratios of the diatonic scale come from repeatedly reducing powers of 3/2 to lowest terms after dividing out the octave.
We do have an equal temperament scale! That’s what most music uses. What we don’t have is just intonation which uses simple ratios/intervals for the notes. It’s just intonation without the beating, equal temperament, which was listen to all day has the beating but we’re adjusted to it.
Do we? My impression was that strings, woodwinds, choirs instinctively tend to use just intonation, and Wikipedia entries for both just intonation [1] and equal temperament [2] seem to back that up. That's why symphony orchestra players will often have a different flute, clarinet, or oboe for different tunings. It's just fretted instruments like guitars that are by nature equal-tempered.
On a side note, both Wikipedia entries reinforce my original point that the mathematics of this is fascinating.
Most popular music we hear outside is based on guitars and pianos, as I play the guitar I always think of music that way. You are right that we naturally sing in just intonation and woodwinds have difficulty with equal temperament based on their physics, however it’s very rare that you will hear a specific song in just intonation. You can search YouTube for performances, it’s pretty interesting to hear the differences.
Not just fretted instruments, pianos as well. Anything which lacks ability to adjust tuning on its own, while being played (things that wind instrumenst and non-fretted strings can do), for example a steel pan drum, would be equally tempered (assuming you want to be able to play in all possible keys).
>That's why symphony orchestra players will often have a different flute, clarinet, or oboe for different tunings.
Not sure what you are referring to here? Clarinets don't come in different "tunings" unless you mean different keys - like Eb or Bb clarinet, but those aren't there for intonation, they play in different ranges of pitch than one another.
Edit: in addition, you don't HAVE to equally temper a guitar. You can choose just intonation. The problem is that you can only have just intonation on a single KEY for that instrument. So if you tune justly to C major, a key like B major, will sound horrendous!
Not everyone tunes their piano equal temperament. I use an alternative tuning ebvtiii which I think is a better compromise. There are a ton of well-tempered tunings with various compromises. I would like a piano that has 15 keys per octave so I can tune it in quarter comma mean tone. (i've seen pipe organs done this way, but never piano.)
Using only 3/2 ratios can sound pretty bad in just intonation as well. Major thirds tuned to 81/64 are off (by a ratio of 81/80) compared with the standard 5/4 tuning, and they don't sound great. This difference is called the syntonic comma and it's been a major issue in the history of tuning.
Yeah, I work in programming languages and always liked the idea of notation do-overs. But after getting more into music these days, I've returned to learning and appreciating musical notation. For better or for worse, it is the standard way of writing music. If you want to get serious at music, you need to know it.
There's a lot to hate about musical score, but the A-G notes and sharps and flats aren't all that bad once you realize that everything is based on the 7 note diatonic scale. In C major, it's just the names of the letters with no sharps or flats. On the piano, C major is just the white keys, which will get you pretty far--tons of songs are in C major. You have to remember B-C and E-F are the short intervals, and memorize the 2-2-1-2-2-2-1 semitone pattern, but after that, a lot follows. Then minor is just starting a different note in this pattern, as are all the other modes. There are other scales too, but this one main pattern is going to cover 98% of all music you run across.
There's a huge amount of stuff that gets unlocked when you just give up fighting the standard and instead learn to go with it. Music is a language, and the way we write it down is maybe a little suboptimal, but then again, the "optimal" way to write it down has a maximum on how much better it could possibly be.
I do have a beef with the notation for rhythm, because as it is, the standard musical notation is just a shorthand form for fitting more music horizontally. For computer-based music, I find it a lot easier to follow a display where horizontal length is proportional to time. We've got infinite screen space, so no need to compress anymore.
We would be a much more musically proficient society if we stopped this obsession with teaching music through written notation and just taught music aurally from the beginning, and notation only later for those who need it. It made sense at a time where recordings were not easily available, but that is not the case now.
Western notation makes sense once you know the circles of fifths, but the specifics of the notation is not really what is holding people musically.
If you want an excellent explanation of why proposals for new notation systems like you’re suggesting have been developed (and failed) Tantacrul has made an excellent video describing the history and tradeoffs that lead us to our current system:
He’s product lead at MuseGroup developing notation software and his expertise lies at the intersection of music composition, UX design, and programming.
>We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.
Do you mean trying to teach all children perfect pitch even though society has no expectation of that? Unlike knowing at least your primary colors which is expected of everyone. I suspect that could be unnecessarily stressful for many.
Or do you mean as some kind of metaphor or analogy? If the latter, I think it would be quite confusing as there are aspects of vision and hearing that are quite different. Pitch classes have no analog in vision that I can think of. Color vision is roughly 3 dimensional but sound is not. The aspects of timbre don't map to color.
I think that understanding music theory does require work. It emerges from physics and physiology and a very long history including a bunch of culturally specific things. Did your ancestors make music with long skinny strings or pipes with nice integer-ish overtones? Here are some tuning systems for you (among them the set of C-D-E-F-G-A-B you mentioned). Did they use bells or gongs with decidedly non-integer ratio overtones? Here's a set of different systems for you!
Anyway, if you have a mapping/analog/metaphor you think is useful between music or sound and color I would be interested to hear it / see it!
I kind of agree with you. I think music theory would be way more approachable if it was taught using intervals instead of all the weird naming of western notation. For example, everyone learns major and minor scales which are the interval sequences (in half steps) 2212221 and 2122122 respectively, but the names major minor don't really help you know other scales (excluding modes, maybe). If someone asks you to play hungarian minor, you'd first have to learn and memorize it. But instead, if you understand intervals and are asked to play 2131131, you immediately know how to play it. For me it also encourages experimentation, because there are obviously way more possible interval sequences to explore right?
The problem as others have pointed out is that most musicians in the west already know some degree of western notation, so if you're collaborating, you'll have to translate back to western notation at some point. Even if you invent the perfect notation, it's like asking everyone to switch to esperanto because english grammar is flawed. And you'll still get people defending english "well actually, it's like that because the greeks blah blah blah".
My favorite music notation flaw is C flat. It's a hack. It's an ugly fucking hack and anyone who defends it is defending an ugly hack. The only reason it and double flats exist is because there are some key signatures (this happens with hungarian minor sometimes) where you end up needing to define 3 notes in the span of one space and one line on the staff, and you can't, so you have to borrow from an adjacent space or line. And so sometimes that C is actually a B. It's super annoying but uncommon enough that it's not worth everyone learning a new notation.
Anyway, don't let the nay sayers stop you from learning music however makes the most sense to you. Have fun
None of this is objective. The construction of our scale is subjective, other countries use different scales. Even with this same scale, there are multiple different tuning systems. There is micro-tonal music. Musical keys are arbitrary too. We teach the way we do because it is a culmination of musical history, our particular western musical history, and it's own arbitrary decisions that western musicians have made over the past hundreds, even thousands of years. If you like, there is also solfege, which replaces letter names with just sounds, "do re mi" etc,
Also what makes you think colours are objective? Different languages have words for a single colour that map onto multiple other words in other countries, does not seem very objective to me, unless you are talking about notating colours as hex or RGB number values, or wavelengths (which we don't do in natural language)
You think music— essentially expressing ideas and emotion through sound— isn’t approachable enough to children because the notation lacks a solid foundation in math? I very much disagree. In fact, I think teaching children to experiment more with musicality well before they’re introduced to things like notation and formal theory would do far more to pique their interest. I happily played guitar for a decade before I learned to read music.
Indeed, likely the most widespread teaching method today is the Suzuki method, and it doesn't introduce reading until after at least the first couple of years. There are books, but they're more for the parents to follow along than for the kids.
American teachers were horrified by this idea when I was a kid. But the Suzuki method has been successful, and I think it has raised the level of playing overall. Many famous musicians self-identify a "Suzuki kids." On the other hand, many of them admit to not being the strongest readers, but reading takes practice. You can also pick up repertoire by following the sheet music while listening to a recording. Like many skills, it fades if it isn't used. I'm fortunate to be a fluent sight-reader, but not a virtuoso.
In my view the notation is what it is. Changing it would be hard. "Standard" notation creates a kind of symbiosis between composers and players. If a composer uses a nonstandard notation, nobody will play their stuff. And the standardization is why musicians can learn the skill of reading.
All the Suzuki teachers I know use the book even in the early years for even their youngest students. It isn't what the method intended, but that is what is commonly done.
I agree that there are some quirks to music theory but ultimately I think it's a very good system that was been refined over hundreds of years.
As for your point about A->B being a larger interval than B->C. There are two half-steps in the white keys (B->C and E->F) because there are two half steps in the major scale! This way, you can play C to C with all white keys and get a major scale.
A major scale is probably one of the most fundamental building blocks in western music theory and it's encoded right onto the keyboard layout itself.
The oddities of music theory are no more strange than all of the strange things in the English language that we just shrug about and move on once we learn it.
We actually have multiple names for all the notes - which have a 'reason' to exist. A B-double-flat and an A-natural, and G double-sharp exist, distinct for notational purposes... yes, it sounds dumb. Music IS arbitrary in a lot of ways.
For example: 12 tone equal-temperament was chosen/invented (nearly) (by Bach) over just intonation because of 'musical gags' like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Musical_Offering (also written by Bach).
Music making neat, orderly, mathematical sense is the struggle, and reality doesn't play nice with harmonics like we would like... (much like with irrational numbers throwing a wrench with Pythagoras' ideals) so stop being a Pythagoras :p
Music IS weird: no matter how you try to quantify it.
Bach did not invent equal temperament. He probably had thought of it at some time, but his writings make it clear that he would be against such a concept. He was in favor of a 12-tone temperament, but it wasn't equal. It's not clear, but I generally doubt he invented it, only that he heard it at some point and favored it.
Thank you for the clarification. Music is weird. My understanding was the well-tempered clavichord was one of the oldest deviations (that was written) from the concept of just intonation: you learn something everyday.
"the well-tempered clavichord" is early in the transition to well temperaments, previously organs (and harpsichords) couldn't play in all keys which was limiting. It may well be the oldest thing we have written (I don't know) however there were a lot of different experiments.
You can tell that this wasn't equally tempered because composers talked about the "color" of each key, a concept that doesn't make sense unless the keys sound different.
It exists in some California schools, but this is one of those things that exists because in some districts the parents setup a 501(c)3 whose only job is to fill the gap left by Prop 13 and Prop 98. My kid's had it every year, but in kinder it was a parent volunteer teaching it and in 1st/2nd the music teacher was entirely funded out of parent donations.
Literally everyone in my country did, and nobody knows theory except a subset of musicians, not even all of them. Thus highlighting my point that the theory is inadequate, subjective, and immature in nature.
Whatever else music theory is, "immature" isn't one of them.
Western music theory has evolved over literally thousands of years. You can put a very rough start of it to Pythagoras, around 550BCe ish, which gives us 2,500 years of evolution and refinement.
But even if you want to start with the popularity and adoption of the major scale, that was around 1500CE ish, which gives us a solid 500 years. It handles many, many corner cases quite gracefully.
It undoubtedly has its quirks, but any notational system for this will also have its quirks (cf, the difference between systems of intonation). There is just no way around it.
I agree, but it seems this is something that will never change, because of tradition.
I tried many times to "understand" music rationally, because I kept people use the term "music theory". I reached a conclusion that there is no "theory" whatsoever: music notation is a hodgepodge of various traditions stacked one on top of the other (we started with 8 notes but then realized that 12 would be better, for example, hence all the mess with flats and sharps). I actually feel better now knowing that you just have to accept it for what it is and go with the flow :-)
> torrents need trackers but we still consider them peer to peer
false. there's DHT and we sometimes exchange magnet links with friends and trackers are optional. trackers just allow it easier and at scale.
> crypto needs nodes but we still consider them decentralized
It's only decentralized when somebody doesn't get to control enough nodes. Even if it was decentralized, it's apples to oranges. It's not serverless or peer to peer and this messenger is not distributed.
reply