I think you are talking about the US. In Europe (at least France & Germany) most professional classical musicians are doing it exclusively (we might be an outlier but it's the norm here), competition is fierce though but at that level it's a full time job. In France we have prestigious ensembles (Orchestre de Radio France, Opéra de Paris, Orchestre de Paris), roughly 20+ subsidised regional orchestras and opera houses, military and police ensembles. That's for full-time permanent job. Underneath that there's the intermittence regime (roughly 100k people) freelance entertainment professional. Between gigs, the government provides a special unemployment insurance program to maintain a steady income. Germany is the same story, on an even bigger scale (100+ state-funded ensembles) but no intermittence equivalent.
But even in the US, are you sure that musicians from the big 5 need side gigs? It seems that the salary in those orchestra are in the $100k-$200k range annually. Enough to live even in the most expensive cities, right?
There are certainly pieces of code that should be put on display, for example productions from the demoscene[1] and competitions like the underhanded C contest [2].
The code in these cases is usually wizardry understood by a select few, but the stories, optimizations, trickery and even formatting can be told to anyone who loves design.
Maybe not, but the process of creation and the final result will be of interest to other creators. Like any hobby it might seem strange to outsiders but it will be fascinating to those who are part of the scene.
one doesn't go to a gallery to watch the painting get made. Creative coding can still be enjoyed by appreciating the output.
The immediate rebuttal to that might be that "AI could just do it" but that's not entirely true - the sort of art that you (typically) see in a gallery isn't "an accurate representation of the world as viewed" just as a lot of "code as art" isn't "a problem solved with code". The camera captures (mostly accurate) images, and AI is usually writing "code that does a thing".
The expressiveness (can) come from a place that's deeply human, and can yield a product that is tangibly diifferent from what an efficient coding process would normally produce.
A few of us played a game when I was in batch at the Recurse Center - we called it Monstrosity. The game was to build a string in the absolutely least efficient way possible - using the largest stack, the most network hops, the most obfuscatory and difficult methods to create a character (bit-shifting algorithms to make ASCII, anyone?). It was beautiful, and it was the kind of thing that AI would never think to do (at least, not without significant cajoling and even then you'd be missing the point).
"hackée" would be the real anglicisme of hacked. Lot of english words are used like real french verb (-er termination) (hacker, booker, spoiler, manager, etc)
I've never had such a linguistic double take after hearing a colleague, who grew up in France, tell me that Nike's or Adidas' billboards in France say: "Le leader en sportswear", pronounced as if it contained four French words (lee-dayr, spôrt-swear, stress on the final syllable in both cases).
In Russian the word for train is poezd, and the prepositional form is poezdje, so you say "I am on the train" "ya v poezdje" (Russian has no articles and drops the copula when it carries no information, so word for word it's "I on train.") One of my friends once told her mom on the phone "ya v trenje" meaning that she took the word "train," pronounced it as though it were a native Russian word "tren", and added the typical masculine inanimate prepositional ending to it. Kinda funny.
When I started using Git around 2006, we didn't have GitHub. We used Google Code for SVN hosting, but we wanted to try Git because it was 'truely' decentralized, so we just pulled from other developers' computers directly. It involved setting up port forwarding on the router and letting your computer on 24/7. Fun times.
Unfortunately no, as most uni students my code was utterly terrible and the app itself was more of a PoC. This was 10 years ago though and it's been on my mind since then, so i'll surely pick it up some point, perhaps after my current start up.
I thought the same but I tried to create a small Django project with APIs, small React frontend from scratch, no LLM, no autocomplete, just a text editor. I was surprised it was all still there after a couple of hours. Not sure it's a skill that useful today, it feels like remembering your multiplication table.
The value is to control the tool chain from idea to production so it can be automated by agents. It's no secret that the final goal is to fully replace developers, the flow "idea to production". It's easier to control that flow if you control each tool and every step.
I won't be surprised if the next step is to acquire CI/CD tools.
But even in the US, are you sure that musicians from the big 5 need side gigs? It seems that the salary in those orchestra are in the $100k-$200k range annually. Enough to live even in the most expensive cities, right?
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