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Typing Practice for Programmers

speedcoder.net

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Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#31

Post by melling »

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.

An IDE does greatly reduce typing. What we need next is some advanced voice input added to our editors. This "John Henry" mentality that developers have about typing never seems to go away. We should be building smarter tools. We're getting closer with voice.

VimSpeak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEBMlXRjhZY

Using Dragon: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html

Using Kaldi: https://www.reddit.com/r/speechrecognition/comments/5p3uxb/p...

This toolkit seems to be the most widely used: https://github.com/dictation-toolbox

Better predictive typing would also be useful. Computer languages often greatly narrow what you probably want to type next, because of scope, for example.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#33

Post by thebelal »

emodendroket wrote: post #24
sanswork wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to a variation on Colemak because I had used qwerty so long touch typing with left hand and pointer/ring only on the right that it was uncomfortable trying to learn to touch type from the home row.

I'm hesitant to take up any of those because not being able to use other computers seems like too much of an impediment.

Colemak changes relatively few keys from qwerty, especially compared to Dvorak. I use colemak full time and can still touch type qwerty reasonably fast.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#34

Post by cheriot »

I love the idea. typing.io's $10/month is a bit steep. Nice to see someone else in the area. It would be really nice if I could turn off the keyboard highlights. It's basically a strobe light when typing and gets distracting.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#35

Post by iamdave »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #6
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.

For me, it's not the fast part that's useful as much as the ability to type braces, square brackets, underscores, = signs, left/right arrowheads without having to look down to locate the key.

Why? Has that historically-on your team-proved detrimental? I'm interested to hear the anecdote on this one if that's the case.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#36

Post by thomasahle »

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.

Usually the "help" given by IDEs can greatly reduce your typing speed. At least those that use point and click, or at require reading a list of options.

If you know you want to type "for.bar(new Baz(qux))" and you have to wait for a menu after ".", after "new" and after "Baz(", the line mat take 6 seconds rather than one.

Even if this is not an issue, most IDEs require you to know lots of keyboard shortcuts by muscle memory to be efficient anyway.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#37

Post by taytus »

ktRolster wrote: post #3
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 will tell you, that if you are in a job interview with a live-coding portion, if you don't type fast, the interviewer will probably think you are dumb. And if you don't know all the hot keys they know, then they will probably think you are ignorant. It's unfair, but happens.

That's totally cool. An interview is a two way street. Maybe we are just not a good fit. And that's totally cool.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#38

Post by rosstex »

_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

That's second to the best typing game ever made, Typer Shark Deluxe.

I wish there was a modern sequel so deeply!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/3450/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hr6drzeFgs

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#40

Post by thomasahle »

iamdave wrote: post #35
ternaryoperator wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's not the fast part that's useful as much as the ability to type braces, square brackets, underscores, = signs, left/right arrowheads without having to look down to locate the key.

Why? Has that historically-on your team-proved detrimental? I'm interested to hear the anecdote on this one if that's the case.

Perhaps it's not detrimental, but I can also program on my smartphone without it causing major problems for the end result. It's just super annoying.
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