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Typing Practice for Programmers

typing.io

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Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#51

Post by edanm »

moonboots wrote: post #29
edanm wrote: post #25

This. Is. AWESOME. Let me tell you what this is useful for by telling you my story: I'm a pretty fast typist (80-100WPM on TypeRacer, usually) and I really never put much thought into my typing, since it was good enough. But I recently started paying attention to the kinds of mistake I make on Typeracer, and realized that I have certain combinations of keys which I don't make using the "home row" of the keyboard, but…

Thanks, I'm glad you found the stats useful. In my initial version, I wasn't requiring the user to correct errors. I was personally getting errors rates around 3~5% , which appear good but seemed too low for the amount of errors I feel I make. Adding the need to backspace and correct keys revealed the true cost of mistyping a key, namely the wasted keys typed before correcting and all the backspaces. Thanks for point…

Just in case I wasn't clear, I absolutely agree that you should force users to correct errors. It's just that the interface right now makes it harder to see how to correct the error, since you don't get visual feedback on the "wrong" characters that you've typed.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#52

Post by dbaupp »

grecy wrote: post #49
ajross wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would prefer Facebook or Twitter? Or that they implement yet another authentication scheme and store their own accounts and credential database? There's no free lunch. The OAuth providers are, on balance, pretty good at what they do and a better choice for account management at small sites. This one happened to pick Google.

> There's no free lunch. Of course there is. No sign-in at all. My question should have been: Why do I have to sign in?

Presumably for keep track of statistics reliably.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#53

Post by sdh »

cool, but what's this -really- for? ;)

recruiting coders?

optimizing keyboard layouts?

optimizing character usage for new language or framework development?

advertising open source projects?

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#54

Post by kschults »

gersh wrote: post #35

It seems like It is interesting. I wonder if I can learn to make fewer typos.

I had issues with the '-' character (for example, in the first line of the Shell Git lesson), and I'm just using the standard US keyboard layout.

EDIT: also '_', as sp332 commented. Firefox on OS X.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#55

Post by eblume »

dbaupp wrote: post #52
grecy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no free lunch. Of course there is. No sign-in at all. My question should have been: Why do I have to sign in?

Presumably for keep track of statistics reliably.

Why not use a cookie, or html5 storage? Is security really a concern here?

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#56

Post by state »

With all of the emphasis on learning how to code I think this is really useful. The insight I really like is that simply learning to type in this weird way is a big part of being an efficient programmer.

Maybe when codeacademy students get frustrated they could spend a few minutes doing this.

Nice work!

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#57

Post by moonboots »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #50

Very impressive. Things I particularly liked: not making me type the indentation (because any sane editor will do that for me), allowing backspace, providing examples in numerous languages. Things that bugged me (and which only become an issue because the example otherwise proves sufficiently realistic that any remaining differences feel awkward, like an uncanny valley for typing code): showing faded-out code I'm not…

Thanks for the feedback and criticism. I decided to keep error correct close to the error instead of allowing navigation to simplify navigation logic. Mimicking normal editing may have still felt stilted if I didn't support the mousing around or keyboard shortcuts programmers are used to with their editors.

I debated whether to require typing the import/include boilerplate at the start of code. As you noted, this usually done piecemeal and often inserted by an ide. I decided to include it as it's part of the code and looked for code samples that didn't go overboard. For the Java and Scala examples, I collapsed imports into wildcards imports.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#58

Post by kanchax »

Really nice. It felt like shadow-boxing the creation of a language. What I mean is that the ability to type what giants typed before me in such an easy and accessible way made it worthwhile. I'll do it again.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#59

Post by ken »

moonboots wrote: post #10
rince wrote: post #8

If anything, this site shows the importance of autocomplete

Autocompletion is an important tool along side typing proficiency. Most of the autocomplete I've used only covers alphanumericVariableNames, so you still have to type the hard-to-reach symbol keys.

As a Lisp programmer, this amuses me. :-)
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