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Typing Practice for Programmers

typing.io

41–50 of 224 posts

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#42
post #25

This. Is. AWESOME. Let me tell you what this is useful for by telling you my story: I'm a pretty fast typist (80-100WPM on TypeRacer, usually) and I really never put much thought into my typing, since it was good enough. But I recently started paying attention to the kinds of mistake I make on Typeracer, and realized that I have certain combinations of keys which I don't make using the "home row" of the keyboard, but…

Thanks, I'm glad you found the stats useful. In my initial version, I wasn't requiring the user to correct errors. I was personally getting errors rates around 3~5% , which appear good but seemed too low for the amount of errors I feel I make. Adding the need to backspace and correct keys revealed the true cost of mistyping a key, namely the wasted keys typed before correcting and all the backspaces. Thanks for point…

Hey, I agree this is awesome. I have noticed as I've optimized my workflow that I actually make a huge number of typing errors when I'm programming. Other typing programs don't test the whole set of symbols we use, so they're not as useful (and I type English considerably faster than code.)

One thing I would say is that it would be nice if it showed stats while I was typing, instead of just at the end.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#45
post #25

This. Is. AWESOME. Let me tell you what this is useful for by telling you my story: I'm a pretty fast typist (80-100WPM on TypeRacer, usually) and I really never put much thought into my typing, since it was good enough. But I recently started paying attention to the kinds of mistake I make on Typeracer, and realized that I have certain combinations of keys which I don't make using the "home row" of the keyboard, but…

Thanks, I'm glad you found the stats useful. In my initial version, I wasn't requiring the user to correct errors. I was personally getting errors rates around 3~5% , which appear good but seemed too low for the amount of errors I feel I make. Adding the need to backspace and correct keys revealed the true cost of mistyping a key, namely the wasted keys typed before correcting and all the backspaces. Thanks for point…

I was taught in typing class that its better to skip errors and then come back and correct them when you are done. Not that I follow that advice especially often, but I wonder if it would be more helpful to do that. I didn't like during the demo that I was forced to correct the problem before continuing.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#46
It doesn't appear to respect my keyboard layout - I'm using colemak (which works fine) but with UK symbols instead of US (which works everywhere else, including the HN comment box, but not in Typing.io where it wants me to type US symblos: eg " and @ are swapped).

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#47
post #41

i really like it, but one thing disturbed me. why do you skip the comments?

Good question! I wanted to focus on helping users practice typing code with its often cumbersome symbols. The majority of comments are prose, comfortably near the home row, which I didn't feel deserved as much attention. Plus some comments (like the ones in the Guava projects) are longer than the code.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#48
post #25

This. Is. AWESOME. Let me tell you what this is useful for by telling you my story: I'm a pretty fast typist (80-100WPM on TypeRacer, usually) and I really never put much thought into my typing, since it was good enough. But I recently started paying attention to the kinds of mistake I make on Typeracer, and realized that I have certain combinations of keys which I don't make using the "home row" of the keyboard, but…

I learned that I NEVER type '}'

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#49
post #31
post #24

Why do you want me to sign in with Google?

You would prefer Facebook or Twitter? Or that they implement yet another authentication scheme and store their own accounts and credential database? There's no free lunch. The OAuth providers are, on balance, pretty good at what they do and a better choice for account management at small sites. This one happened to pick Google.

> There's no free lunch.

Of course there is. No sign-in at all.

My question should have been: Why do I have to sign in?

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#50
Very impressive.

Things I particularly liked: not making me type the indentation (because any sane editor will do that for me), allowing backspace, providing examples in numerous languages.

Things that bugged me (and which only become an issue because the example otherwise proves sufficiently realistic that any remaining differences feel awkward, like an uncanny valley for typing code): showing faded-out code I'm not expected to type and skipping it, not allowing any navigation other than backspace (I frequently "correct" errors by ignoring them until I finish typing what I wanted to type and then going back and correcting them, which means the "collaterally typed before backspacing" characters are not wasted keystrokes), not allowing copy-paste (particularly important for lines like #include or import), not showing incorrect characters I've typed.

Things you probably can't do anything about: typing a file in a more natural order than top-to-bottom (the Haskell exercise starts with a giant export list, and the Python exercise starts with an import list). Normally, you'll extend those as you go, rather than typing them all at once.

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