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This should just be titled "Tools used by people with great hacker egos but may or may not actually be great hackers", because these are not predictors of great hackers.
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You're wrong. Learn to type well and then come back and tell us it didn't make you a better programmer. If you don't know how to type, then you're wasting brain cycles looking for keys when you have to type, cycles that would otherwise be spent thinking up good identifiers and nice function names. Not knowing how to type also means you'll choose terse identifiers rather than clear ones because it's too much work typi…
I "type" most words when I'm programming by hitting two or three initial letters, and then pressing M-/ to complete (emacs does that by scanning all open buffers for something that matches, usually quicker than anyone could type the whole word). I don't choose terse identifiers, I choose long ones that I know emacs will be able to find completions for easily. I don't see how typing faster would help me.
This very conversation is easier to have if you can type your thoughts as you have them whilst not being distracted by hunting and pecking.
And if typing speed is more relevant than thinking depth then I probably made the right decision in that Gladwell blink moment.
In another recent HN post, several people had a similar reaction to "shop" as in 'work for a great ruby shop'...
Heres a partial list of non-sequiturs - six sigma isoN000{0} skillset core competencies coder java [ contentious, I know, C++ is borderline ] loc - lines of code metrics / kpis candidate coordinate role leadership deliverables
Competency is particularly insidious - being merely competent rules out any kind of real craftsmanship, or "Xen and the art of Motorcycle maintenance" connection to the thing your doing. If your competent, you've checked a box, and thats the wrong reason to do anything.
Am I overreacting?
Great hackers don't use IDEs: they write them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I "type" most words when I'm programming by hitting two or three initial letters, and then pressing M-/ to complete (emacs does that by scanning all open buffers for something that matches, usually quicker than anyone could type the whole word). I don't choose terse identifiers, I choose long ones that I know emacs will be able to find completions for easily. I don't see how typing faster would help me.
Typing faster helps everyone. Programming is more than just writing code. It's communicating with people, documenting bugs, documenting code, etc. If you're telling me you never run into a situation in which being able to type faster would help you, then I'm saying I don't believe you. This very conversation is easier to have if you can type your thoughts as you have them whilst not being distracted by hunting and pe…
I don't hunt and peck, or look at the keyboard very much, but I definitely don't touch-type (I taught myself, and use all the "wrong" fingers).
There are no great Smalltalk hackers? Great hackers don't use IDEs: they write them.
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The dismissive attitude of "programming doesn't require typing skills" is extremely naive. Shrug... Well I say that because that's my experience. I've never really been concerned with micro-interruptions. I guess I'm surprised this bothers people so much (It's the macro interruptions that hurt me more). I've been in situations where I've been unable to type (or type quickly). I learnt and grew as a coder more in thos…
You're wrong. Learn to type well and then come back and tell us it didn't make you a better programmer. If you don't know how to type, then you're wasting brain cycles looking for keys when you have to type, cycles that would otherwise be spent thinking up good identifiers and nice function names. Not knowing how to type also means you'll choose terse identifiers rather than clear ones because it's too much work typi…
Obviously there's a lower bound, if you have to look at the keyboard then you probably need to improve, but the importance of being able to touch type perfectly is overplayed.
Do all authors need to learn short-hand?
Typing speed? Not sure how much code people here write per hour, but I doubt typing speed is a real issue (the ratio of my staring at the screen thinking versus coding is probably 10:1).
In higher level languages I'd say it's much less as issue.
Typing speed? Not sure how much code people here write per hour, but I doubt typing speed is a real issue (the ratio of my staring at the screen thinking versus coding is probably 10:1).
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Could that be because you exclude Windows hackers from your definition of "hacker"? I know some folks on the Google Toolbar team. I don't use Toolbar, and neither do any of my friends. It's desktop software, and desktop software for Windows, so I mostly ignore it. But their installed base is huge . I'd wager that if you added up the combined user base of every Web2.0 startup mentioned on this site, you still wouldn't…
Exactly, and look at IE6... combine the amount of every web 1.0 startup's VC funding and you wouldn't have the number of users that used IE6. AND they used Visual Studio. Userbase != great hackers
It was a genuinely better browser than the competition. The problem isn't that IE6 wasn't a good browser - it's that IE6 was a great browser in 2001. But in 2009 - it's not really up to scratch.