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Typing Practice for Programmers

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Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#41

Post by Groxx »

rosstex wrote: post #38
_m8fo wrote: post #16

In my opinion there's no better practice than playing Typing of the Dead. If losing in a game irks you even a little you'll definitely improve your typing speed by playing if your current speed is slow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jslf5hJMtvs

That's second to the best typing game ever made, Typer Shark Deluxe. I wish there was a modern sequel so deeply! http://store.steampowered.com/app/3450/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hr6drzeFgs

No love for Mario Teaches Typing? https://archive.org/details/msdos_Mario_Teaches_Typing_1992

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#42

Post by melling »

Swizec wrote: post #22
collyw wrote: post #2

Coding by typing fast never seems like a great idea for me. Isn't there a saying "weeks of programming can save hours of planning". Plus a decent IDE will eliminate the need for this type of thing.

It's not about the typing speed, it's about levels of abstraction. You want the basics to be automated so you can think about important things. Could someone like Steph Curry or Kobe Bryant be an effective basketball player if dribbling the ball took conscious effort? Probably not. Code is typed. Typing it slowly slows you down. Just like a slow compiler does or a slow IDE or even a slow computer with spotty internet…

That's why you use good tools. You select a region of code then reindent the entire region, right? Not line by line? You refactor a variable name in all places with one command, not individually.

It's possible that typing is a bottleneck, but I bet if you calculated your actual keystrokes, you'd find that it's very few words per minute.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#44

Post by crispinb »

collyw wrote: post #2

Coding by typing fast never seems like a great idea for me. Isn't there a saying "weeks of programming can save hours of planning". Plus a decent IDE will eliminate the need for this type of thing.

I doubt there's a very significant productivity advantage to typing fast. But there seem to be a couple of advantages to practising fluid touch-typing: (1) the more automatically you type, the more your thinking as you type is in chunks larger than mere characters. To me at least this feels like text input is less of an interruption to the thinking I had been doing just before typing (2) I find it to be quite a handy warm-up exercise, particularly if my mind feels mushy or reluctant. It's close enough to what I'm doing when actually coding to kind of shoehorn me into the whole process, but easy enough to avoid mental baulking.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#45

Post by mherrmann »

For anybody learning to touch type, I highly recommend looking at alternative keyboard layouts. I use QFMLWY, which reduces typing effort by 43% in comparison to QWERTY (for some measure of "effort") [1]. It greatly reduced my wrist pain, and just feels much "lighter" to type.

[1]: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#46

Post by ftlio »

iamdave wrote: post #35
ternaryoperator wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's not the fast part that's useful as much as the ability to type braces, square brackets, underscores, = signs, left/right arrowheads without having to look down to locate the key.

Why? Has that historically-on your team-proved detrimental? I'm interested to hear the anecdote on this one if that's the case.

It's just a bit frustrating hitting the wrong key? It's not more complicated than that.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#47

Post by [deleted] »

_m8fo wrote: post #16

In my opinion there's no better practice than playing Typing of the Dead. If losing in a game irks you even a little you'll definitely improve your typing speed by playing if your current speed is slow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jslf5hJMtvs

[deleted]

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#48

Post by thomasahle »

melling wrote: post #42
Swizec wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the typing speed, it's about levels of abstraction. You want the basics to be automated so you can think about important things. Could someone like Steph Curry or Kobe Bryant be an effective basketball player if dribbling the ball took conscious effort? Probably not. Code is typed. Typing it slowly slows you down. Just like a slow compiler does or a slow IDE or even a slow computer with spotty internet…

That's why you use good tools. You select a region of code then reindent the entire region, right? Not line by line? You refactor a variable name in all places with one command, not individually. It's possible that typing is a bottleneck, but I bet if you calculated your actual keystrokes, you'd find that it's very few words per minute.

You don't type most of the time, but once you identify a few lines that need to be written or rewritten, it's useful to be able to at least type without conscious thought, so you can keep focus on the high level structure.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#49

Post by analog31 »

If I type more, I make more bugs. But my mom made me take a typing course, the summer before high school, i.e., in 1978. It has had an unexpected benefit, years later:

I suffer from eyestrain headaches when I stare at a computer screen for a long time. I can type very fast, including all of the numbers and symbols, but if I slow down just a tiny bit, then I can type quite accurately. As a result, I can type long stretches of text or code without looking at the screen for mistakes.

Because of that kind of eyestrain, IDE's don't really help me. Having all of that info on the screen and requiring me to look at it, just makes it more painful sooner. So I code in a plain text editor. Stackoverflow is my IDE. ;-)

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#50

Post by thomasahle »

melling wrote: post #31
collyw wrote: post #2

Coding by typing fast never seems like a great idea for me. Isn't there a saying "weeks of programming can save hours of planning". Plus a decent IDE will eliminate the need for this type of thing.

An IDE does greatly reduce typing. What we need next is some advanced voice input added to our editors. This "John Henry" mentality that developers have about typing never seems to go away. We should be building smarter tools. We're getting closer with voice. VimSpeak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEBMlXRjhZY Using Dragon: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html Using Kaldi: https://www.reddit.com/r/sp…

Most fast typers type much faster than they speak. Thus I don't really think this would help.
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