Related, I've wasted so much time in my life, typing things that don't matter at all to anyone but myself. I suppose there are worse vices!

I get what you mean (and agree w.r.t. math/code) but notably, I think appreciation for a lot of things still accumulates if you put in the work.

As an amateur violist, I can attest that I gained a totally new appreciation for most of the pieces I've studied and played in an orchestra in the past.

This not only includes "unknown" classical music from different eras, but also the obvious (popular) candidates like Beethoven's 6th, Dvořak's 9th and Grieg's "Peer Gynt" suites.

And there's a lot of great music one needs to get into first; for expample: I love Tool songs exactly for that, and there are certainly more obscure artists :)

So, I suspect the thing about maths and code is mainly just caused by the fact that people can go through life just fine without really interacting with them on the level required to develop the smallest bit of "taste" (as opposed to e.g. music).

> Code (and math, for that matter) is almost the same except for one key difference: they are not easy to appreciate without deliberate training, training which is often far to the side of anything most people need/want to deal with.

I would argue that this exists on a spectrum. There's lots of art and music that's pretty difficult to appreciate without deliberate training, and indeed there are whole categories of music which we would probably call music for musicians.

For example, the album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis is loved by many and is considered by most people to be the best gateway record into the world of jazz, because it's easy to listen to and appreciate. An album like Sketches of Spain, and especially an album like Bitches Brew, are more difficult for the average non-musician listener to get into.

An even more out-there example for music is Allan Holdsworth. In certain circles, he's a well-known and well-regarded name, considered highly influential. Most people have no idea who he is or what he did. (A bit like that cutaway in Family Guy where they jumped to Benjamin Disraeli and he simply said: "you don't even know who I am!").

Similarly, in art and painting, you often need training to understand why something was especially impressive. Now that we have photography, some old paintings can feel "boring" if you don't know how to appreciate the level of difficulty in producing a near-photorealistic work in the 1700s.

Conversely, some math is very easy to appreciate without training! I had a buddy who I got excited about math simply by explaining the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio, then showing trivial examples of how they appear in nature. My friend got lit up about math that day in a whole new way.

Coding is not really programming. It is certainly a highly adjacent skill, but coding is not the same as programming. To quote Leslie Lamport, coding is to programming as typing is to writing.

Hence we can't take this lesson to the workplace.