I&#x27;m a musician who performs for money maybe 2 times a week on average.  And I don&#x27;t make a lot of money, and I&#x27;m not all that great, etc.<p>I have a different perspective on your point.<p>When I was little, I learned to read and perform.  And I could get around playing clarinet in my school band.  But I never really read or even played all that well.<p>Years later, I had more or less stopped reading because none of the people I play with read anything... but I had been composing a lot of music and had learned to play several instruments including piano and guitars.  You don&#x27;t have to &quot;write&quot; to program a sequencer or tell the banjo player to play these 4 chords over and over.<p>In the last couple of years, however, I&#x27;ve gotten more interested in theory and had a lot more opportunities to play written music (cello and double bass with my wife&#x27;s orchestra and later bass and piano with a 16-piece jazz band).<p>It really wasn&#x27;t until I was able to play well that I got to where I could functionally read well enough to do it on sight.<p>I now know a whole lot more theory-- enough at least to look at some intervals and say &quot;ah, that&#x27;s the root to the three to the five in the bass&quot; without worrying about the key, and then have my hands just play the stuff.<p>And the reason I have somewhat of a grasp on theory is that I&#x27;ve played for years in situations where I&#x27;ve had to improvise a bass line or guitar solo for a tune I&#x27;ve never heard, and so theory has been both very helpful and proven by practice.<p>My point is that I feel the same way about code: I have a hard time reading code at a useful level if I couldn&#x27;t have written similar code.<p>So I feel that it can be more helpful to learn to &#x27;create&#x27; in some fashion -- I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;d call it writing-- before learning to formally code things.  I don&#x27;t agree that learning to read before we learn to speak is all that helpful for most folks.