Whereas this system appears to emphasize a programmatic description of the music.

Of course, with MIDI, there's that underlying programmatic description, and you could use various means to work with MIDI in a more programming-style if you wanted, but I for one have mostly generated music either through playing an instrument, or sometimes through exporting music notation files (Sibelius, Dorico, etc.) to MIDI files.

To me, the idea of programming the timing and duration and intensity and so forth of a note from scratch seems like it would be harder and less enjoyable to do than to just play the note on a keyboard -- even if I turned around and applied some MIDI transforms to clean it up. But for someone who doesn't play music much, and is good with programming, this coding approach might prove easier.