I feel like you're ignoring the amount of training that an expert musician does to learn a specific piece of music and maintain their proficiency in it. For the most part, they don't go to professional gigs and play something novel.
Traditional musicians have a whole live or real-time performance aspect as do athletes, dancers, etc. I think the amount of time they spend preparing for this can be similar to the time we spend working on one programming task. Bigger problems take more preparation. The difference is we don't have to then do a live performance after we've figured out how to program it. We just accumulate a recorded artifact and ship it, rather than doing a live recital after we've figured out all the difficult bits.
So it's difficult to draw parallels. Programmers have more in common with writers, painters, and sculptors who all work on a tangible artifact that is delivered after the fact and which acts as an accumulator of time-shifted work product. Some crafts, like glass blowing, are more like live music in that you develop a skill but then have to make a real-time performance each time you produce the artifact.
Traditional musicians have a whole live or real-time performance aspect as do athletes, dancers, etc. I think the amount of time they spend preparing for this can be similar to the time we spend working on one programming task. Bigger problems take more preparation. The difference is we don't have to then do a live performance after we've figured out how to program it. We just accumulate a recorded artifact and ship it, rather than doing a live recital after we've figured out all the difficult bits.
So it's difficult to draw parallels. Programmers have more in common with writers, painters, and sculptors who all work on a tangible artifact that is delivered after the fact and which acts as an accumulator of time-shifted work product. Some crafts, like glass blowing, are more like live music in that you develop a skill but then have to make a real-time performance each time you produce the artifact.