Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Joy of Typing

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 94 posts

Re: The Joy of Typing

#11

Post by nbouscal »

coffeecodecouch wrote: post #7
nbouscal wrote: post #2

> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??

> That blows my mind. Really? I don't find it that shocking at all that most people might type at a tenth of the speed a programmer can type. I'm sure a chef could express the same awe at my inefficiency when making Kraft Dinner.

Realistically I don't think programmers type prose all that much more frequently than college students. Programming tends to involve lots of symbols, and most of the typing is in small edits rather than paragraphs. College students write long essays and term papers, whereas I rarely write anything longer than an in-depth comment on Hacker News. I agree that it makes sense that programmers type faster due to the general correlation with technology usage, but I'm still quite surprised by the magnitude of the difference.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#12

Post by nerfhammer »

mikestew wrote: post #4
nbouscal wrote: post #2

> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??

I can type that fast on a phone. I'll assume for the sake of discussion that this number is accurate across a general population. If you sit at a keyboard long enough, how can you not get faster than 12.2 wpm? So much for "kids growing up with computers". All that time in front of a keyboard since kindergarten, and you're output is still restricted by your abysmal typing speed? OTOH, do typing classes even exist anym…

I think I could only do like 30WPM until I sat down and trained myself to actually type correctly and promptly could type 2-3x that

http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/

Re: The Joy of Typing

#13

Post by zatkin »

I think I have found the absolute worst typing test[1] on the Internet thanks to this article. It keeps a timer running until you "hit tab and click stop". You're telling me that I need to stop tying, move my hand over to my mouse, dragm the mouse button to that "stop" button and click the button? That'll lose me typing time...

[1]: http://www.calculatorcat.com/typing_test/

Re: The Joy of Typing

#14

Post by taternuts »

taeric wrote: post #5

60 words a minute is still very slow, when it comes to thinking speed. Unless I'm just off my rocker, of course. This is also why folks that take really good notes by hand often have some sort of shorthand system. My question, then, is it worthwhile to investigate some of the more advanced typing techniques out there? I'm curious, but highly skeptical.

I have to agree, 60 WPM is pretty slow. Even at 130 WPM I still struggle to keep up with my thoughts sometimes. I don't use any special technique/layout because I find 130 to be pretty proficient, but I'm sure using dvorak or some other odd layout would improve speed after the initial learning curve.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#16

Post by dmd »

This is definite check-your-privilege/assumptions territory for me. Reading the headline alone, I assumed this was going to be some sort of "you should slow down, zen out, and think more clearly, by not typing so fast" post. The idea of 60 wpm as being fast took me a while to grasp.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#17

Post by incision »

I can certainly type sixty words a minute, but when it comes to retention there's no comparison between typing and handwriting for me and I don't find myself transcribing.

I have a notion that the permanence and chunkiness of writing keeps thoughts 'whole' whereas the ease of backspacing allows the same words to become abstracted. I'll have to try typing with backspace mapped to newline or something to see how the idea plays out.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#18

Post by nbouscal »

taeric wrote: post #5

60 words a minute is still very slow, when it comes to thinking speed. Unless I'm just off my rocker, of course. This is also why folks that take really good notes by hand often have some sort of shorthand system. My question, then, is it worthwhile to investigate some of the more advanced typing techniques out there? I'm curious, but highly skeptical.

I average 140wpm without any "advanced typing techniques", so I don't think they're really necessary. I can't speak to whether or not they would be helpful, though. I do think it's very worthwhile to be able to type this fast - people speak somewhere around 150wpm on average, and being able to type as fast as you speak is useful for instant messaging, etc.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#19

Post by e12e »

coffeecodecouch wrote: post #7
nbouscal wrote: post #2

> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??

> That blows my mind. Really? I don't find it that shocking at all that most people might type at a tenth of the speed a programmer can type. I'm sure a chef could express the same awe at my inefficiency when making Kraft Dinner.

These are not "most people", these are college students. If you can't write an essay at a reasonable pace (and don't have an excuse like studying pure math -- by your own admission computer science is out) -- it would appear basic education has failed. Not that that's much of a surprise -- the only reason I'm not hobbled by poor, self-taught, typing is that I was offered touch typing (on a typewriter, mind) in junior high school.

I suppose it's testament that for all the fun of being an autodidact, there are some skills that really do benefit from tutoring (I'd argue most skills do, but the challenge is to find a good tutor...).

Re: The Joy of Typing

#20

Post by mikestew »

"because you’re no longer struggling with the tool at hand."

I saw this coming somewhere around the first paragraph. Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?"

As a parallel, take Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) as a guitar player. Sure, his playing was sloppy as hell when playing live. But the man knew the fret board. He knew all of the places any note could be played, he knew which boxes will allow the riff he wants to play (in fact, I doubt he thought "which box?" but rather "here's where I need to be"), the man was comfortable with his tool and the guitar has the appearance of being an extension of his hand when he plays. He never looks like he's mentally saying "okay, I need an A# next, which is...". This allows him to move on from rote mechanics to making incredible music.

Typing is the same IMO. If you struggle with typing, the first thing you're likely to do is reach for the mouse for anything other than text entry. Which means you reeaach over to the mouse, then mooooove the mouse, click, and...what was it you were doing again? Then when text entry time comes it comes out as "M...y...C...l...a...s...s... ...*...f...o...o". The tool is taking up mental cycles when it should be more of an extension of your thoughts.

It's been argued on HN and elsewhere that typing speed has little bearing on productivity for programming since one spends more time thinking than typing. My counter to that is that the two probably intersect more often than you think they do, and when they do you don't want to be burning cycles figuring out which finger to use to reach the "w" key.

Post reply on HN