Back in the mid-90s, I asked my mother to teach me how to knit. Like many women of their time, both she and her mother were skilled at Aran knitting¹ and I was always impressed at the complex patterns that could be created from a length of yarn with two knitting needles – or three for the more complicated stitches. Even though this was the 90s and mindfulness wasn’t something anyone would have heard of in rural Irela…
Why do you consider playing guitar as something tactile but not programming? Genuine question really. Isn't playing guitar also not producing anything tangible?
Definitely IMO code is a real physical thing that produces tangible results. (I personally think that code operationally is a physical thing, down to basics like logic gates and stuff. We abstract far away from that with high level languages but even making a pixel change colors is inherently, to me, altering physical reality)
But the experience of writing code and making music with your body is such a different one. You will feel and think about the code in a more imaginary and thoughtful way (you could write all your code in a notebook or a text editor and you would just be writing or typing on a keyboard) whereas the music (I play a wind instrument) is a tactile experience in the sense that it will physically be something you hear and you can actually feel the vibrations in your body; I might be wrong but I think that is what hearing is. And there is a real bio-feedback thing going on because you use your body to physically make it happen and you get immediate or very near immediate feedback (auditory, etc. You may even hear or see feedback from other musicians or even listeners). It’s just a viscerally different experience.
There’s nothing fake about seeing metrics on a dashboard or tests going from red to green or money or bits of data flowing around, at all. But it is experientially much different from the feeling of playing an instrument.
That’s my take anyway.