What types of music – genres, bands, composers – are best for programming?
The well-known “Mozart effect” suggests that listening to the great man’s music can improve your concentration and help you to make intuitive leaps… making his music perfect for programming to, surely? The study itself has been brought into question, but besides, Mozart doesn’t always hit the right note (so to speak). Programming isn’t just a single activity – different tasks take a different type of thought, so it follows that each needs a different style of music to nudge your brain into the right gear.
For those in a slightly trippy, Java annotation-mapping kind of place, I can recommend Psapp’s little-known album Tiger, My Friend. It’s an unconventional mix of (I assume) whatever object-that-makes-a-sound happened to be nearby while they were recording, put to acoustic rhythmic effect overlaid with sultry vocals; the result is somewhere between Penguin Café Orchestra and Frou Frou, in other words quite surreal, and it’s perfect for meta-programming.
If you’re in the process of “Mavenising” your middle-aged project from its horribly complex, dependency-strewn Ant farm, something epic and drawn-out would be suitable… because let’s face it, you’re going to be there for a very long time, watching Maven pull in new dependencies that you never knew your project needed, wrestling with POMs and conflicting version numbers, and rearchitecting your project so it satisfies Lord Maven’s “common default” settings. What you need is a concept album, something with tension as you migrate from one religion to another (and don’t believe the Maven “party line” that it’s not an Ant replacement… ooh no sir, of course it isn’t)… Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds should do the trick.
For complex searches made simple in XQuery, where you just want to focus on pure declarative logic with none of the clutter of an imperative language, order your playlist to start with Robert Pollard’s latest and return to his roots with some vintage Guided by Voices. (I think there's an XQuery joke in this paragraph somewhere, see what I did there?)
Using Python or its corporate sibling Jython? That one’s easy… Black Mamba from The Academy Is, or in fact just about anything from the Snakes on a Plane soundtrack. (Presumably for Jython users that would be Jnakes on a Jlane).
Having a spot of trouble writing unit tests for legacy code? You need some Discipline, of the Nine Inch Nails variety. There’s something sado-masochistic about Test Driven Development, so it seems apt to me.
If you’re lucky enough to use Scala on a real enterprise project, watch out… it’s so good that you’ll quickly discover, within yourself, an innate dislike for the rest of the industry that you never realised was there, lurking, waiting for a (genuinely) superior programming language to bring it to the surface. You won’t want to return to a world without side-effect-free functions, and you’ll mutter under your breath at those colleagues who harp on about the dynamic typing “benefits” of Ruby. Not that you’ll turn into a hard-bitten misanthrope, but when you’re programming in Scala, nothing but The Dead Milkmen will do. (“Do not like your average life… hope you do not take a wife… I do not like them in a tree… I do not like them, Sam, you see.” Actually that may have strayed into Green Eggs and Ham, but moving on…)
Creating new EJBs – here’s hoping that you never have to. Even the newer EJB spec is not much more than a heavyweight framework stuffed into a lightweight wrapper, like the Duke of Wellington’s champion wrought-iron cannon squeezed inside a sausage skin. But in this economy at least, a contract’s a contract… so if it pays to be churning out entity beans, crank up something equally heavy… the rhythmic pulsing of The Breeders should brighten your day. Or if the cat pissed in your cereal this morning, crank up the self-loathing with a couple of Metallica albums, assuming the DRM servers are still up. Either way, feel the bass guitar thumping away in time with the EAR deployer’s invalid archive version exceptions rolling past, to jolt you into that thudding, pumping, EJB-cranking frame of mind.
Presidents of the USA – the only music to play while installing Linux – assuming it’s Slackware. With more user-oriented variants such as Mint or Ubuntu, you could probably get away with listening to Britney Spears while watching the Gouraud-shaded progress bar eat its way across your walled-garden Gnome desktop while it magically upgrades you to the Krashing Koala.
The first web developer who gets to crank out a site dripping with CSS, without having to worry about the legacy monster that is IE6, could do worse than trip along giddily to The Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever... entering the carefree shangri-la of standards-based HTML coding, trusting that your page will render on each browser just as the spec decrees. Just groovy, maan.
Everyone has their own favourites, of course; their own preferred 'sonic cathedral of sound' to click the brain into just the right gear for the task at hand, and this list could go on forever, or as long as LastFM (or Pandora.com, if it was ****ing available in the UK) keeps popping up meditative new suggestions. Perhaps there's something to the Mozart Effect after all...
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