Performing music is profoundly unlike writing essays or writing code. In writing code, there is effectively only pure thought. The quality of one’s code, when developed by oneself, is only a function of one’s ability to conceive of code. This ability itself stems from a large number of factors: expertise, innate ability for organization and abstraction, the amount of structure one can keep in conscious thought at any given time and so on form the basis for coding. But it is ultimately a matter of thinking and no more.
Thus the programmer never experiences the frustrating feeling a musician must face: a programmer’s ability to code is not limited by his physical abilities, but by his imagination.
Of course, imagination can be nebulous and one can conceive of structures without the level of detail actually required to implement them.
But a musician can actually know all of the details he requires and yet be unable to transfer his imagination to reality for others to hear because his fingers are not strong enough or he lacks the coordination in his limbs necessary to have them move concurrently.
In another branch of pure thought, there is mathematics. Mathematics has a curious quality of intuition that makes imparting mathematical ability extremely difficulty. Mathematics seems to be a field in which raw talent is vastly more important than in, say, civil engineering. (I don’t know much about civil engineering, but this is my general feeling.) Even relative to programming, mathematics seems more talent based. One should keep in mind that the majority of our mathematical knowledge until the 20th century was produced by a very small group of men (a few astoundingly brillliant women among them in spite of terrible difficulties faced). This is made more remarkable by the enormous scope of mathematics. Few fields encompass so much knowledge and that this enormous area of human achievement has been produced by the pure thinking of a handful of men is fascinating.
The interplay of talent and skill is another question I think merits continual thought.