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Typing Practice for Programmers

typing.io

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Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#121

Post by super_mario »

samd wrote: post #103

I don't understand programmer's obsession with typing efficiency. We're not typists. Typing is a tiny fraction of the time I spend programming. Most of the time I'm thinking, or talking to another developer about a problem. I could have the fastest typing skills and most efficient editor and not even be marginally more productive.

People who say typing is not their bottleneck are saying they are not I/O bound but CPU bound. Makes me think what other things you need to improve before you notice your typing can't keep up? But that's kind of backwards. You will never know until you can type fast and freely, liberating your brain to actually think about the problem and code and not finding keys on the keyboard. Besides not everything you do is original and new or inventive. Sometimes you are just doing crap that you know how to do already, and typing or not using smart editor is the bottleneck. But people who can't type usually don't know this. What you don't know can't hurt you, or it can perhaps?

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#122

Post by ismarc »

samd wrote: post #103

I don't understand programmer's obsession with typing efficiency. We're not typists. Typing is a tiny fraction of the time I spend programming. Most of the time I'm thinking, or talking to another developer about a problem. I could have the fastest typing skills and most efficient editor and not even be marginally more productive.

Obsessing over typing efficiency doesn't make much sense, but being able to reasonably quickly with a high level of accuracy type makes a huge difference. By being able to touch-type at ~30 words a minute (making a rough guess here, I have no data to back up where the speed actually lies) means that you can quickly and easily get the bit of typing necessary over with and get back to thinking, planning and studying for the next bit of typing that's necessary. As an anecdote, I type extremely fast, but type for probably 45 minutes of the day in 30 second to 1 minute bursts every so often. In that burst, I likely create or edit a couple of functions and put in the calls to it. And then go to working on the next piece. There's rare times where it'll be a concentrated stream of typing, but that's following a large period of scrawling in a notebook.

I cannot fathom how people can find the time to actually approach any particular problem at a reasonable depth if it will take them more time to type out the solution than reading and understanding the existing code and determining how to solve the problem. Sure there's code where there's boilerplate, or add a line to a bunch of files, or tons of ways that raw typing speed doesn't play much of a benefit, but when it comes time to type, having to move your hands and look to find the { is akin to a carpenter having to read every label to find the bottle of glue.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#126

Post by DannoHung »

Things that bother me in the extreme: Not showing letters as they are typed in the advanced lessons. That immediate feedback is how I know that I'm typing a word correctly and how I know if I make an error that I have corrected it.

Penalization for adding additional whitespace between identifiers in some situations: "[one,two,three]", for example, I personally like adding a space after the comma and do it automatically.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#127

Post by CodeCube »

bhrgunatha wrote: post #98
CodeCube wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because then they can't run reports across all users/languages. This is an awesome dataset that (I hope) they are collecting for language designers.

Why not? How does cookie storage of information about your progress prevent those reports? Presumably they are storing that information in their back-end somewhere.

I don't know about you, but I have a windows desktop, a windows laptop, and a macbook pro that I regularly work from in different contexts. I much prefer cloud services that store my account information, and let me log in from whatever computer I want ... local storage would remove that benefit for users like me who don't really care that they're using my google login ;)

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#128

Post by h4pless »

MarkJHagan wrote: post #112

Awesome! This is incredibly cool. Bug: Caps Lock key is ignored. Feature Request: c#

I'm glad to see someone else mention the Caps Lock issue, I was starting to fear that I was the only one who used it or that it was just an issue on my end. I would like to see the Caps Locks functionality added to the Rails practice set too if possible. Otherwise I think this is a fantastic resource you've created, moonboots!

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#129

Post by moonboots »

swah wrote: post #117

Kinda OT, but I noticed you're using Google Fonts, and they load instantaneously. When I use Google Fonts, they take a little bit, usually loading after the whole site is already displayed. Did you optimized anything regarding this?

Hmm, I'm not doing anything special. I just put the web font link at the top of head. I'm also only including the default font weight. How many assets does your page have? Typing.io is relatively slim, so the font download can occur relatively sooner. If I'm not mistaken, the initial css downloads blocks the page load, but the actual ttf/woff/etc download occurs async and may be delayed if there is other stuff.
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