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Anyone else find speaking commands out loud to distract from thought? "slap... slap... jog... dot... word... chk... slap... snore"
How the hell did he code it without using his hands? With help?
To his amanuensis: Slap. York. Tork. Jorb. Chomp.
Or maybe he felt his hands going, and he spent the last few months of his pre-RSI existence coding this up.
If you could speak a bit softer with this, maybe throw in some noise-cancelling headphones, I could totally see this being useful even in an office situation.
I could see a potential pseudo-language developing out of this to abstract a lot of the individual characters, functions and common invocations used while coding.
Once you are an adequate touch typist typing speed is only beneficial if you use a language that requires you to type a lot of boilerplate. Even then, you can use an IDE for auto-completion. I can type at very high speeds — as fast as others can input text by using their voice — but I can't remember the last time I needed to type for more than a minute at a time. If you use a language that requires you to spend more time thinking about code than it does to actually type it, typing speed really doesn't matter. Code is like speech in that it is judged by the eloquence, not the speed, of its delivery.
I guess it depends on the type of software you're working on, but input speed has never been close to being the bottleneck with coding for me... Most of the time I'm trying to figure out what to do or how to implement an algorithm. Rarely do I get those mad-scientist frenzies where I'm typing away frantically trying to get all the words down as they come into my mind in a flash of inspiration.
It also helps to stop coding for a minute, think what you want to do, then code until you stop typing for more than 5 seconds, repeat.
"Emacs pinkie" is a non-issue if you use a keyboard with thumb clusters, e.g a Maltron or a Kinesis model. Investing in a good keyboard is just as crucial as investing in a good chair, especially if you make a living by coding. The time that you spend compensating for a bad input device by hacking your own workarounds can be more costly then spending money on a proper solution. Once you are an adequate touch typist t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mentioned this on HN previously but as a nearly 40 year old developer who has been developing professionally for nearly 20 years -- it used to be the norm for programmers to get their own offices, even just the regular joe programmers... Places really tight for space might put two guys in a very spacious shared corner office... A few years into my career the idea of cubicles caught on and quickly became the norm, and…
Absolutely relevant article by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fieldguidetodeveloper...
It's unfortunate he couldn't get the OSS speech recognition to work, though.