"It helps to know some music theory if you write and perform music, but a lot of very successful songwriters and performers get by very happily with just enough music theory."
This is an absolutely bogus comparison
I disagree. There are very successful songwriters and performers who have no training, but almost all of the good songwriters and performers did have (usually classical) musical training.
The same is absolutely true in software: There's a lot of very popular crap out there, but the software which is universally recognized as good -- code like TeX -- almost always comes from authors with solid computer science training.
There's some good stuff in TeX but it's been buried in an avalanche of shit from people who aren't Knuth. You can get TeX in a couple megabytes (http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html), but if you install something like pdfTeX or XeTeX or TeXlive, well I hope you've got a big hard drive.
This is an absolutely bogus comparison
I disagree. There are very successful songwriters and performers who have no training, but almost all of the good songwriters and performers did have (usually classical) musical training.
The same is absolutely true in software: There's a lot of very popular crap out there, but the software which is universally recognized as good -- code like TeX -- almost always comes from authors with solid computer science training.