A difference may be that you start speaking around age 1/2 and then the written word follows about 5 years later. If you start learning to play the piano at age 8 and wait for 5 years to be introduced to any musical notation, then this will be very late and will have cost you 5 years of training and getting used to reading (and writing) said notation.
Indeed, and this has been an area where music education has gone back and forth. Historically, the popular Suzuki teaching method started with playing by ear (and being told where to put your fingers) exclusively. Today, "Suzuki" teachers generally add reading to the curriculum, not right away, but fairly early.
An amusing bit of reverse psychology, the kids who learn to read can begin to have more fun on their own than just playing the boring stuff from their lessons. This motivated both of my kids.
These days, the person who is utterly helpless without a sheet in front of them is a rare exception, except maybe on piano. But there are two things "wrong" with the piano: Not just the notation, but the focus on playing it as a solo instrument. In my view, in addition to reading and ear training, the other component that needs to be started as young as possible is playing with other people. The Suzuki method does emphasize this quite heavily. It's hard to do with pianos.
I fully agree. Compare to natural language: Monologues have their place, but speaking to others is essential to learn, and so is interacting musically with others.
I do also think that some education philosophies focus too much on notation, but being illiterate (as in: not being able to read musical notation) is restricting quite a lot what you can do and how you can learn.
The symmetric keyboard is a fun concept, but its existence as niche is similar to why QWERTY is still dominant. Inertia. Most keyboards have it, and computer keyboards are much easier to change than pianos. Once you have reached a certain fluency, the jump needed from this local optimum to a new one is prohibitively high/far. For musical instruments, this would mean you would be unable to play anywhere but at home.
That's a huge drawback and it's really underappreciated by everybody advocating for the "better" concept.
Besides, there is the unrelated drawback that especially for a beginner, it's really easy to learn simple tunes with just the white keys on a piano. Throw in a black one now and then and you can get quite far and have fun as a kid. This would be much more intimidating with a symmetrical layout.
> you create something not because “I think they might need this,” but because “I find this so fucking interesting.”
This is a fantastic insight.
I also find that it's what often gets overlooked in open source projects that start as somebody doing something on the side as a hobby. Don't create and publish open source projects to please others. Build something that you like to have yourself. When publishing it, do it as an invitation to others to try it out and perhaps give you feedback (crowdsourcing bug triage and extension ideas), not to make others happy. The trap is that others will start feeling entitled, start demanding things, and if you give in, you violate the insight I quoted above. And if you start losing interest, don't cling on to the project, but be open to some other maintainer adopting it. Don't waste your time maintaining something you are not internally interested in.
The same is true also for users of open source projects. Be aware that whoever did this and published it for you to use did so originally because they like it and want to use it themselves. You can't demand things from somebody like that. If you do, you actually make it more likely that they lose interest.
> I personally want to make a living making software products, not services. GPL doesn’t seem to offer me a way to do this.
These two things are pretty unrelated.
For Android apps, a common model to have a paid version in the play store and still publish the source code on github with GPL. Here the GPL actively protects you against somebody coming, doing some minor modifications and then pushing their own paid-for version to the app store while not publishing the source code (which they could easily do with other licenses).
> it is absolutely a fact that the GPL takes away some rights.
Expressing it like you did is misleading. One man's freedom is another man's restriction. It's two sides of the same coin.
It is absolutely a fact that laws against murder take away some rights. Suddenly you are not allowed to kill other people. You do not have that "freedom" anymore. Flipside is that others now have the freedom to walk around without fearing that they can lawfully be killed by others. You pay for granting one "new" freedom by removing another, opposing freedom.
The GPL grants new rights for a party by restricting rights of another party. Just like all licenses do.
