For anybody learning to touch type, I highly recommend looking at alternative keyboard layouts. I use QFMLWY, which reduces typing effort by 43% in comparison to QWERTY (for some measure of "effort") [1]. It greatly reduced my wrist pain, and just feels much "lighter" to type. [1]: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization
Typing Practice for Programmers
51–60 of 172 posts
Re: Typing Practice for Programmers
#52It's probably much more boring but quite comprehensive for most things.
The real challenge usually comes when you're touch typing and mixing different hot keys and autocomplete functions (vim plugins in IDEs, for example).
Re: Typing Practice for Programmers
#53If I type more, I make more bugs. But my mom made me take a typing course, the summer before high school, i.e., in 1978. It has had an unexpected benefit, years later: I suffer from eyestrain headaches when I stare at a computer screen for a long time. I can type very fast, including all of the numbers and symbols, but if I slow down just a tiny bit, then I can type quite accurately. As a result, I can type long stre…
Re: Typing Practice for Programmers
#54I don't know if a programming-specific one is needed but you can save a lot of time learning how to touch-type. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties...
Re: Typing Practice for Programmers
#55If you find yourself bottlenecked on typing while programming, it's a signal that you should stop what you're doing and write some automation or abstraction. Sometimes you can just structure a program so that it requires less typing --- almost always a good thing.
In the rare cases where you need to be verbose in source code, you can use build-time source code generation, or failing that, an editor snippet library. I like yasnippet for that purpose.
Back at Microsoft, NT kernel style requires a big doc-comment before each major function. (These comments are extremely helpful --- but that's beside the point.) The doc comment's style is a bit more complex than Javadoc; there are multiple sections (e.g., description, arguments) and specific indentation requirements within each section.
I found it very annoying to write and format these comments. Instead of just cursing doc comment writing all day, I took a week and solved the problem. I taught Emacs to highlight and indent these comments. I taught M-q to reformat paragraphs exactly as needed. I added code to automatically generate a skeleton description from the function prototype. And after all that, I was never bothered by the doc comment stuff again.
(Incidentally, in a big monolithic IDE, I think the barrier to this kind of extension would have too high to bother with, and I'd have been left cursing this code.)
Re: Typing Practice for Programmers
#56In 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
Re: Typing Practice for Programmers
#57Is typing speed really the bottleneck when programming? For me, it's definitely either the speed of thought or the time it takes to look up names, interfaces, etc.
Re: Typing Practice for Programmers
#58In 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
Re: Typing Practice for Programmers
#59(Edit: for spelling, oh, the irony)
Re: Typing Practice for Programmers
#60If you think fast typing makes you a better programmer chances are you are a typist and not a programmer.