101–110 of 116 posts
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).
Well I guess typing speed is important when programming Java. It's so verbose just some simple ideas take hundreds of lines of code. 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).
I have never seen a good hacker who was a slow typist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really spend that much time typing? I spend most time thinking :/ 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?
More like "do all authors need to learn longhand? Printed lettering is fast enough".
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).
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).
I can understand the "that's not the bottleneck" argument. But the problem with going too far down that road is this: Imagine if you had to wait one second for your keyboard to respond to any key you type (and one second between keystrokes). You could still produce awesome code and be a great hacker, but can you look me in the proverbial eye and tell me that this would not handicap you in some way? Think about the co…
I've had this experience, while traveling I had a really slow internet connection and had to do some work via ssh to fix a server, it was hell...
You go through that experience one time and you learn that being able to automate as much as possible with tools like capistrano and sprinkle for server setup is crucial (it also started me on the path to keep my /etc configuration files on git...)
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).
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties...
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).
I think that if you don't have to think about typing at all you don't have to schedule time-slices for thinking and editing. It's just a side-effect that your fingers work really fast for almost anything when they're autonomous: this is the thing referred to in the article.
For example, I often observe that I have two parallel processes going on: thinking and editing. I keep editing the file, correcting formatting, keeping lines beautifully cut and moving stuff around _autonomously_ while I'm still thinking about the _actual_ problem. It's like biting your nails when thinking over something: it just happens, you don't _do_ it. Doing stuff that you don't need to think about at all actually helps me in the thinking part.
To be able to do that you have to master the keyboard, both for writing text, writing code and moving around (and you need emacs to move around quickly enough, imho hehe:)). I wouldn't want to imagine synchronising my trains of thought over a mental mutex in order to switch between editing and thinking.
This means that there's minimal latency over your thinking and what gets into the program. If it's low enough, programming becomes fluid as you couple thinking and changing the source code in nearly real-time. I could guess that many poor souls who have spent way too much time over the keyboard have realised this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typing speed is important for the reason the article mentions -- micro-interruptions. Most of the time, you just have to type a few words, and the editor will complete the rest for you. Fine. But a lot of the time, you are typing a symbol for the first time, and autocompletion doesn't really help. It breaks your flow if you can't type this symbol quickly and correctly the first time. (It is also worth pointing out th…
That reminds me of the reasoning behind wanting faster processors in our personal computers. From one (mistaken) perspective, you could argue that there is no justification for buying a faster processor because it will just be idle for more than 97% of the time you use it. The better argument is that we are justified in desiring a faster processor because the length of the CPU bursts is a much more important metric.