Dr. Dotnetsky alive and well in Phoenix, and Programmers as Musicians. . .

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We've noticed a conspicuous absence of the revered Dr. Dexter Dotnetsky on eggheadcafe.com over the last couple of months. However, I recently got an email from him with the photo below attached. He says he is in Phoenix, working on a top - secret project, and will be back soon.


On another "Note", have you ever noticed the high percentage of programmers who are also accomplished musicians? Being a former semi-professional jazz musician myself (played bass with the Robert Hunt Trio in New York, played with the likes of David King, Jules Broussard, and Noel Jewkes in San Francisco, even played shakuhachi duets with Schawkie Roth in Mill Valley) I find this particularly interesting.

Surely the inventors of C# were musicians, no? (the key has seven sharps)... I think it has to do with brain chemistry myself. Particularly jazz musicians. What do you think?

throw new InvalidOperationException("Cannot restart Brain that is already in motion.");
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous11:27 AM

    my personal theory is that such subjects as music, mathematics, linguistics, and even computer programming are all part of the same general mental discipline - master one, and chances are you can master the others

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous8:07 AM

    Go along with the languages/programming generalisation. Based on aptitude I should have studied English, French and German for my A-levels (16-18yrs exams) but opted for Maths, Physics & Chem instead for job prospects... Eventually ended up in Programming 10 years later.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous4:29 PM

    Very interesting correlation. As a musician of various styles including jazz, I have to agree that is does exist.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous8:11 AM

    Surely the inventors of C# were musicians - maybe not ... the Italian for the '#' symbol is 'canceletto' ... little GATE !

    Bill ?

    ReplyDelete

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