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Hacking to Great Guitar Rock Songs

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Preconditions:


  • Many hours of monotonous coding ahead. Perhaps data cleaning, comment-checking, pixel-pushing, or code reviewing

  • Desire to be entertained with lightly mind-engaging, upbeat music

Acceptance Criteria


  • Songs must be rock-and-roll, ie, from the last 60 years

  • Songs must feature prominent guitar work

  • Songs must have been popular when released

  • Songs must be recognizable to at least 40% of a randomly-selected audience

  • Songs must generally be upbeat

  • This must be a predefined, finite, readable list of songs that I own, not songs I want to buy, or songs I should be downloading

What would be the right way to code this? Given not a lot of time, I simply chose songs from "100 Greatest Guitar Solos" off of my hard drive. But I wondered: is there a better way? Not some quasi-internet radio station, a better way of picking songs with such fuzzy, yet describable criteria.

Result Set


  • Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin

  • Free Bird, Lynyrd Skynyrd

  • Hotel California, The Eagles

  • Crazy Train, Ozzy

  • Johnny B. Goode, Chuck Berry

  • Sharp Dressed Man, ZZ Top

  • Europa, Santana

  • You Shook Me All Night Long, AC/DC

  • Honkey Tonk Women, The Rolling Stones

  • Whipping Post, The Allman Brothers

  • Yellow Ledbetter, Pearl Jam

  • Walk, Pantera

  • Master of Puppets, Metalica

  • Crossroads, Cream

  • Eruption, Van Halen

Errors? Omissions? What was wrong with the code and what is the correct result set? What upbeat rock guitar songs are the best to hack to?

2 Comments

"Dogs" - Pink Floyd
"Powderfinger" - Neil Young
"Go Your Own Way" - Fleetwood Mac
Something by Queen & Dire Straits. And you left out Hendrix & Dick Dale!

Good ones!

Thanks for the extra tunes.

I was sorely pressed to cut Dire Straits, Queen, and Hendrix. But you're right: I should have left them in.

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on May 29, 2009 1:20 PM.

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  • DanielBMarkham: Good ones! Thanks for the extra tunes. I was sorely read more
  • SubAstute: "Dogs" - Pink Floyd "Powderfinger" - Neil Young "Go Your read more

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