Musical culture seems to resist illumination, perhaps fearing that the "magic" will somehow be broken. The irony is that music is, in a sense, a mathematical illusion, but revealing the trick only makes it more fascinating.
This is true, but I think the answer is far more mundane. Musicians operate at a couple of levels of abstraction above that SO answer, so such details become irrelevant to them.
Imagine if the standard introduction to programming was a course on Java or PHP. Pretty soon you'd have a plethora of programmers who didn't know a thing about pointers or any of the old tricks programmers used to do with assembly. Wait... that's already happened :)
I'm not sure I understand. Your argument for why musicians should start at a higher level of abstraction is that starting programmers at a higher level of abstract works out poorly?
Yeah, and now we argue about whether or not knowing the basic mechanics of your typical language (be it programming or music) can help you achieve a greater global understanding and thus allow you to be a better musician/programmer overall.
This is true, but I think the answer is far more mundane. Musicians operate at a couple of levels of abstraction above that SO answer, so such details become irrelevant to them.
Imagine if the standard introduction to programming was a course on Java or PHP. Pretty soon you'd have a plethora of programmers who didn't know a thing about pointers or any of the old tricks programmers used to do with assembly. Wait... that's already happened :)