It kind of reminds me of the periodic declaration someone makes on HN that textual programming sucks and we all need to switch to something else, usually visual programming in this case.

If someone takes time to deeply understand the advantages of the textual approach and then builds an alternative, I'll listen.

But at this point, anyone who is doing this and their criticism of the original approach is shallow and uninsightful, where it's basically just "it's old and it must therefore suck", is unlikely to produce a good answer.

I think that applies to the music notation case too. "Conventional" music notation isn't just a staff and a couple of types of notes. By the time you handle all the use cases that conventional notation handles, or even just a solid subset of it, your brand new notation is probably a lot less elegant than it started out as in someone's head.

Exactly. Music theory is a programming language for musical composition and performance.

Unlike most languages it's inherently two dimensional because music includes both horizontal (time, rhythm) and vertical pitches (chords/colours, harmony) information.

And - especially important - melody is an element that needs both.

You can't represent the same information with text without losing a lot of important content, which is why toys like Sonic Pi are more limited than they seem.

You can kinda sorta represent the same information on a piano roll, but it's not any easier to read than dots - in some ways harder, because you're not going to see the relationship between a bass line and chords as clearly.

Is it a good programming language? It's quite dense, but not denser than some code idioms. The 2D element is unique, and hard to represent in other ways.

The learning curve is steep, but it's probably as good as it can be given the requirements and constraints.

Have a look at http://terpstrakeyboard.com/about/ and the janko keyboard

I know neither is about music notation per se (but about fixing the piano), but it is analogous: Music notation has exactly the same problem as the piano -> it defaults to C, which makes everything else relative to C and overly complicated.

For the record, I don't think this means we should switch to a new system, but it is usefull to recognize that it is suboptimal, if only to be able to accept it and continue (because nobody is going to translate everything to some new notation)