Comment by scarecrowbob

It would be really hard for me to improvise a clarinet solo based on the melody line in that kind of notation, which is something I have to do pretty frequently in my old style jazz band using fake books.

I'm sympathetic to that view; I spent all evening writing electronic music by programming it into a sequencer and spent a lot of my early career (starting in about 1999) programming using a piano roll.

But "easier for what purpose"? It'd be really tough to read at a gig off a piano-roll.

It took a long time to become comfortable with the fact that standard notation is mostly a suggestion that doesn't contain the years of context I need to get through a big band gig on double bass... but once I realized that my ability to sight read got good enough that I stopped wishing there were some other kind of notation to read.