This is an example of a product I would buy, but would never buy as subscription software. $60/year to infinity is about $600 at a 10% discount rate.
Sorry, but it's probably worth about $25 to me, not $600.
Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers
41–50 of 79 posts
Re: Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers
#42Learning to type quickly is a valuable skill. But with programming, is typing speed a common bottleneck? It seems akin to learning how to turn a steering wheel more quickly or how to hammer faster.
Typing speed is rarely (I was going to say "never") the bottleneck, IDE or no IDE.
The bottleneck in programming lies in designing something that works correctly, understanding someone else's design or legacy code, designing test cases, debugging problems, addressing performance issues. It is a brain-bound problem, unrelated to motor skills.
I have never thought "this project would have succeeded if only everyone on the team had been a faster typist!"
Re: Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers
#43All this does is make me realize how much I take my IDE for granted. In no example that I tried did I even get past the first line before I missed using IDE autocomplete or shortcuts. It got under my skin that I had to type out each character. Take the Scala example. I would NEVER type "@SerialVersionUID" with correct casing. I'd maybe type "@Ser" and then auto complete. Or "@SV" and then auto complete. I can't recal…
I have to somewhat disagree, I think autocomplete is one of those IDE features that is no doubt quite useful but I think its contribution to developer productivity is greatly exaggerated... frameworks that are well designed for instance are far more important contributors to developer productivity... so my question to you is, what if a tool has a framework that allows you to get a lot done with significantly less cod…
Your disagreement is kind of out of place here; no claim was made of where the productivity boost of autocomplete ranks against other development factors. Besides, whether or not you use autocomplete is orthogonal to your framework choice.
Re: Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers
#44Nice UI! For programmers trying to improve their general typing speed I reckon it could help, but for me it creates an almost uncanny experience. In the JS test I found it incredibly difficult to type out `/^(?:parents|prev(?:Until|All))/`, because my mind interprets it somewhat like its AST -- i.e. I see a delimited regular expression with an uncaptured group nested within another uncaptured group. I focus on the op…
I wonder what things would look like if they were to let you type, free-form, and not consider it complete until your code matched that of the sample. That way, you could use copy and paste, or bang things out and then fix them later rather than in-line. (e.g., let me type keywords and then later realize I forgot a 'self' in a Python method.)
Probably less about typing, then, though.
Re: Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers
#45Learning to type quickly is a valuable skill. But with programming, is typing speed a common bottleneck? It seems akin to learning how to turn a steering wheel more quickly or how to hammer faster.
Slow typing can be very tedious while pair programming, though the tedium is also a function of anxiety and patience.
Re: Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to somewhat disagree, I think autocomplete is one of those IDE features that is no doubt quite useful but I think its contribution to developer productivity is greatly exaggerated... frameworks that are well designed for instance are far more important contributors to developer productivity... so my question to you is, what if a tool has a framework that allows you to get a lot done with significantly less cod…
Except it isn't just auto complete he is describing. It is also code generation. The example he gave would come with an auto import. Other examples would include class and method generation, exception handling, parenthesis matching and test stubs.
I don't disagree at all that all the features you describe are nice to have. They do indeed make the programming experience more pleasant and add some utility. What I am arguing against is elevating those features over more effective productivity boosting solutions that may not have quite the same dazzle.
Intellisense in general is kind of expected now in any IDE; it is like the buttons in your car to slide down your windows (old enough to remember the handles :) ), they are nice and expected but you wouldn't base your buying decision purely on that.
Re: Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers
#47The problem is that nobody writes code like that (char by char, like prose). You often jump back and forth between statements and parens, and code from inside out.
I write code like that. I tend to have a good idea of what the code should be doing, and write it out, char by char, like prose.
I also avoid IDEs and prefer text editors. In the twenty-five years of programming, I've not found an IDE I like, and I suspect I'm a langauge-maven than a tool-maven (http://osteele.com/posts/2004/11/ides) (as long as I can type, I can try out a new language; I don't have to wait for a specific IDE to come along first).
Edit: add a link about language-mavens vs. tool-mavens.
Re: Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers
#48Learning to type quickly is a valuable skill. But with programming, is typing speed a common bottleneck? It seems akin to learning how to turn a steering wheel more quickly or how to hammer faster.
Slow typing can be very tedious while pair programming, though the tedium is also a function of anxiety and patience.
I admit I'm a terrible pair programmer, so my experience may not be representative, and while I sometimes get frustrated when the person with the keyboard fails to hit the right keys (and to be fair this person is sometimes me!), almost always the main source of frustration is when can't agree on something or when one repeatedly misunderstands the other.
On the other hand, when we are on the same page, slow typing is seldom a problem.
Re: Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers
#49Nice UI! For programmers trying to improve their general typing speed I reckon it could help, but for me it creates an almost uncanny experience. In the JS test I found it incredibly difficult to type out `/^(?:parents|prev(?:Until|All))/`, because my mind interprets it somewhat like its AST -- i.e. I see a delimited regular expression with an uncaptured group nested within another uncaptured group. I focus on the op…
I was thinking all of these things too as I was trying it. I think there is something fundamentally wrong about this. I don't think the words per minute for a programmer's typing is important. As you say, to get the higher score, you must simply type as you read character by character, but this is not what programmers do. I don't see much value in this because of that. If our jobs were to transcribe code that someone had written out by hand then this might be something worth its disk space. If we find code that we want to copy exactly without trying to understand its meaning, we have a clipboard for that.
Re: Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except it isn't just auto complete he is describing. It is also code generation. The example he gave would come with an auto import. Other examples would include class and method generation, exception handling, parenthesis matching and test stubs.
I don't disagree at all that all the features you describe are nice to have. They do indeed make the programming experience more pleasant and add some utility. What I am arguing against is elevating those features over more effective productivity boosting solutions that may not have quite the same dazzle. Intellisense in general is kind of expected now in any IDE; it is like the buttons in your car to slide down your…
> What I am arguing against is elevating those features over more effective productivity boosting solutions that may not have quite the same dazzle.
Who are you arguing against though? Nobody ever made that claim, or as far as I can tell, even implied it.