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Typing Practice for Programmers

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Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#81

Post by diamondo25 »

Insanity wrote: post #70

This test is a bit..silly to me. I am an enthusiast of mechanical keyboards, own a few, and have enjoyed typing for as long as I can remember. On top of that, I can type quite fast - depending on which keyboard I am using as it does affect me a bit I reach about 720cpm on my mx blues (ducky keyboard) and about 670cpm on my KBP keyboard with Matias Quiet Click switches, which is my slowest board. (on the 10 fast finge…

I have thought of getting a mechanical keyboard, but I don't think I need it. I have been typing a lot on a standard Acer keyboard for a couple years, until the W key dome was gone, making it really hard to use with gaming. After that, I switched to the light Logitech K700 keyboard with flat keys. Typing on it feels good and I don't need to type fast, I want to type accurately. And in the end they are pretty quiet :).

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#82

Post by BigJono »

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

I've been toying with the idea of making a spiritual successor to this for years, always been too busy with work though. It's one of my favourite games of all time!

Maybe there's some artists/developers here that would want to collaborate to reduce the time burden a bit? :P

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#83

Post by melling »

thomasahle wrote: post #50
melling wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't say that typing would be completely replaced with dictation.

You still want predictive typing, for example. If I want to refactor a variable name, indent a region, or create a class from a template, having a smart assistant that could be invoked with voice would be helpful.

As for people being able to type faster than voice recognition, I think voice recognition at 100 won would be fine for most people:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10166812

It certainly would be nice on my iPad.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#84

Post by chjohasbrouck »

quotemstr wrote: post #55

Programming is a unique field: if you're doing it right, it should never be dull. Frustrating? Draining? Rage-inducing? Sometimes. But not mind-numbing. Why? Because we can build our own tools. If we find ourselves doing repetitive work, we can build a tool to automate that work. This automation is itself likely at least somewhat interesting. What isn't repetitive and that can't be automated should be interesting as…

This is why no matter how much sense it makes to use something like vim or emacs as your primary development editor, I could never justify the amount of time it would take me to actually be totally comfortable and start seeing benefits (beyond just using it for small quick edits at the command line).

Typing speed is never the bottleneck. You could double most developers' typing speed when they code and it'd probably have a negligible impact on their overall productivity.

There are benefits, but do they really outweigh the benefits of those same hours spent studying a data structure or design pattern or trying new tech?

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#85

Post by dorianm »

Really liked the choice of discourse for the ruby typing, it's a very very interesting and well thought project.

But I'm still not typing with the ten fingers like recommended and this could be of great help to change my way of typing to a more optimized one.

Thanks

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#86

Post by mistercow »

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 have always disagreed with the rationales given for why typing speed doesn't matter for coding. Maybe it just depends on how your brain works.

I can't really think about a problem while I'm typing. I can think, or I can type what I've already decided to type. Worse, the longer I'm not thinking about the problem, the more I lose my place. So for me, typing speed is critical. I need to get the part I'm working on out as fast as possible, so I can get back to thinking about the problem.

Now that said, we tend to justify the abilities we have, and discount the abilities we don't. I'm a very fast typist, so I do have some skin in the game to think typing is important. I suspect that people who are not fast typists also have some impetus to think that typing speed is unimportant.

Nonetheless, I do think what I said above is a factor, at least for some people.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#87

Post by wtetzner »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #65
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…

Slow IDE, slow compilation, spotty Internet force you to wait and captures your attention. Slow typing doesn't capture your attention, if you touch-type. Your hands are typing while you go on thinking. If you get to the point where typing is the bottleneck you are not thinking enough and you should be working on some more difficult problem instead.

Typing can be the bottleneck because your thoughts get too far ahead of your fingers. You can only hold so much in your head, so getting the code out into the editor as quickly as possible allows you to free up some short-term memory.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#88

Post by dman »

chjohasbrouck wrote: post #84
quotemstr wrote: post #55

Programming is a unique field: if you're doing it right, it should never be dull. Frustrating? Draining? Rage-inducing? Sometimes. But not mind-numbing. Why? Because we can build our own tools. If we find ourselves doing repetitive work, we can build a tool to automate that work. This automation is itself likely at least somewhat interesting. What isn't repetitive and that can't be automated should be interesting as…

This is why no matter how much sense it makes to use something like vim or emacs as your primary development editor, I could never justify the amount of time it would take me to actually be totally comfortable and start seeing benefits (beyond just using it for small quick edits at the command line). Typing speed is never the bottleneck. You could double most developers' typing speed when they code and it'd probably…

I agree this things like typing speed and a good editor should not matter but in reality I think it does. I think the state of programming flow is very hard to get into, and very easy to fall out of. In fact the easiest way I find myself getting out of state of flow is if I find myself doing something mundane. Anything that allows you to do more while you are in the flow, or lessens the chance of breaking out of it is valuable in my opinion. Will share an anecdote here - before I started using clang-format for formatting my code, I expected that adopting it would merely save me the time I spent formatting. On the contrary what happened was that it has almost completely changed the way I write code when I am in flow since I now no longer have to worry about having to make it look good. In retrospect I now find that in the past I would often spend crucial parts of my programming flow doing mechanical indentation of code and doing such a mechanical activity was often a ripe target for me to fall out of flow.

My typing speed and accuracy are both pretty low, when and if I correct that, I hope to have a similar efficiency gain as I did when I adopted clang-format since I won't be falling out of flow for mundane things like typos. Not every moment spent programming is equal, and in my humble opinion it really helps to invest in making your "special moments" more productive.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#89

Post by mgcross »

z1mm32m4n wrote: post #66
quotemstr wrote: post #55

Programming is a unique field: if you're doing it right, it should never be dull. Frustrating? Draining? Rage-inducing? Sometimes. But not mind-numbing. Why? Because we can build our own tools. If we find ourselves doing repetitive work, we can build a tool to automate that work. This automation is itself likely at least somewhat interesting. What isn't repetitive and that can't be automated should be interesting as…

I see where you're coming from, but this tool is still valuable in a number of cases that I don't think you're considering. I recently got a new mechanical keyboard, which had special "layers" for punctuation. "Common" punctuation like periods and commas are still there, but other punctuation like curly braces, brackets, etc. require new key combos. [1] I agree with you that a lot of the time programming requires mod…

I built a Planck, and as much as I appreciate the ortholinear layout, I'm having a hard time finding/configuring a keymap that has the necessary symbols somewhere that feels intuitive. I'll spend a couple hours acclimating to a keymap on typing.io, but if I need to an ANSI staggered KB, even for a couple hours, it seems to wipe my muscle memory. Guess I need to buy another Planck!

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#90

Post by mgcross »

Insanity wrote: post #70

This test is a bit..silly to me. I am an enthusiast of mechanical keyboards, own a few, and have enjoyed typing for as long as I can remember. On top of that, I can type quite fast - depending on which keyboard I am using as it does affect me a bit I reach about 720cpm on my mx blues (ducky keyboard) and about 670cpm on my KBP keyboard with Matias Quiet Click switches, which is my slowest board. (on the 10 fast finge…

Agreed,if the bottleneck is CPM/WPM ,you probably need better tooling in the form of scaffolding/boilerplate. But for those who can't touch type this could reduce the cognitive load of hunting-pecking. I need something like this (or typing.io) that will let me configure auto-complete so that it matches Sublime.
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