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

Typing Practice for Programmers

speedcoder.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 172 posts

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#111

Post by p10_user »

chjohasbrouck wrote: post #84
quotemstr wrote: post #55

Programming is a unique field: if you're doing it right, it should never be dull. Frustrating? Draining? Rage-inducing? Sometimes. But not mind-numbing. Why? Because we can build our own tools. If we find ourselves doing repetitive work, we can build a tool to automate that work. This automation is itself likely at least somewhat interesting. What isn't repetitive and that can't be automated should be interesting as…

This is why no matter how much sense it makes to use something like vim or emacs as your primary development editor, I could never justify the amount of time it would take me to actually be totally comfortable and start seeing benefits (beyond just using it for small quick edits at the command line). Typing speed is never the bottleneck. You could double most developers' typing speed when they code and it'd probably…

It doesn't take much time to be equally comfortable with vim/emacs as you are with your normal editor. Anything you learn after that is a bonus. It's hard to say how much faster I am using vim than a normal editor, but I'm a hell of a lot more efficient and comfortable doing it.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#112

Post by rosstex »

BigJono wrote: post #101
rosstex wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to make my babysitter play while I watched, because I was astounded she could do so well on hard. Now I play on X-Treme and see if I can make it to the end.

I remember when I was a kid X-Treme seemed impossible, I thought the developer put the difficulty in as a joke. Nowadays I load the game up once every few months and I tend to beat X-Treme first shot every time, unless I get unlucky with the toxic sharks. It seems you need around 110-120wpm and decent reaction times to finish it.

And make sure I don't hit the wrong letter to start a new fish! That always manages to trip me up. That makes sense, my range is usually around 110. Damn I hate those toxic sharks!

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#113

Post by c3RlcGhlbnI_ »

This is really bad for getting better at typing for code in the same way all other typing tutors are.

The problem is that programming overuses a bunch of character sequences that rarely come up in standard english and thus in most of your typing practice, e.g. special characters, and mid-word capitalization. If you want to improve your typing speed for programming faster than you would just writing code normally you have to focus on those sequences.

You would probably want to practice with something that looks more like obfuscated code than beautifully formatted segments. Ideally you could even generate such segments so as to work out your least performant two character sequences while not slowing you down too much by being too random looking. Though even just repeatedly typing "jf" then random characters using the right pinky will be more helpful than this or https://typing.io

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#114

Post by pthreads »

BoringCode wrote: post #73
_m8fo wrote: post #16

In my opinion there's no better practice than playing Typing of the Dead. If losing in a game irks you even a little you'll definitely improve your typing speed by playing if your current speed is slow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jslf5hJMtvs

ZType is also really fun (and it runs in the browser) http://zty.pe/

Second that. It also helps me unwind actually. I play this once in a while even though I am a decent touch-typist.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#116

Post by wott »

menssen wrote: post #63
collyw wrote: post #2

Coding by typing fast never seems like a great idea for me. Isn't there a saying "weeks of programming can save hours of planning". Plus a decent IDE will eliminate the need for this type of thing.

1. I have found, when you know what the next word is, that there is a typing-speed line that if you are above, just typing the thing is faster than using IDE autocomplete. It also disrupts your flow less. I am convinced, although only based on anecdotal evidence, that a lot of the vim/other-editor vs IDE debate is significantly based on how fast you can type. 2. There are a significant number of programming tasks whe…

> There are a significant number of programming tasks where the typing-to-thought ratio is relatively high. Refactoring is one. Debugging is another.

I might agree for a few cases of repetitive refactoring, but debugging? Definitely not, that's really something where you spend 99% of your time observing, conjecturing, thinking.

Edit: Oh, I had not read the following sentence with care:

> In my experience, the faster you can type, the more likely you are to solve these problems by trying things, rather than attempting to guess what is happening in your head.

That's not debugging. It's just trial and error until the output randomly happens to be the expected thing. That's a terrible way of doing. Gee... if you don't understand what is going on, you cannot consider the bug is fixed. You may even have introduced more problems than you corrected. What's wrong with thinking to sort the problem out once and for all, instead of rushing anywhere like a headless chicken?

But it seems to be the current method, especially in web development. It probably explains a lot of things about the sad state of those applications.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#117

Post by CuriousCosmic »

dxhdr wrote: post #94
quotemstr wrote: post #55

Programming is a unique field: if you're doing it right, it should never be dull. Frustrating? Draining? Rage-inducing? Sometimes. But not mind-numbing. Why? Because we can build our own tools. If we find ourselves doing repetitive work, we can build a tool to automate that work. This automation is itself likely at least somewhat interesting. What isn't repetitive and that can't be automated should be interesting as…

Being able to type quickly and accurately is enjoyable. It lets my brain stay focused on what I'm writing rather than how I'm writing it. No context switches necessary, no mistake every 10th key; typing should be fluid and easy. I highly recommend improving your keyboard skills if you struggle with touch typing. That said I agree that "Typing Practice for Programmers" on "SpeedCoder.net" is a little silly. Just learn…

Honestly I believe that a programming specific typing practice program such as this one does serve a purpose as even though I can type well in a normal setting, I am much slower with many of the special characters as they just aren't used as much outside of the programming environment.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#118

Post by macintux »

crispinb wrote: post #44
collyw wrote: post #2

Coding by typing fast never seems like a great idea for me. Isn't there a saying "weeks of programming can save hours of planning". Plus a decent IDE will eliminate the need for this type of thing.

I doubt there's a very significant productivity advantage to typing fast. But there seem to be a couple of advantages to practising fluid touch-typing: (1) the more automatically you type, the more your thinking as you type is in chunks larger than mere characters. To me at least this feels like text input is less of an interruption to the thinking I had been doing just before typing (2) I find it to be quite a handy…

About 25 (sigh) years ago, I worked alongside a former journalist. Listening to him type was awe-inspiring. I could type reasonably fast, but where I typed in words, he typed in complete sentences. Machine-gun.

I think there's something to the idea that typing faster could help you think faster when it comes to text, but not sure it applies to software development.

Post reply on HN