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Typing Practice for Programmers

speedcoder.net

51–60 of 172 posts

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#51

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

I feel like learning a non-qwerty layout would make it difficult to switch between computers. What has your experience been? Is QFMLWY supported on pretty much every device? How does it compare to Dvorak?

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#52
I'm getting server error (500). This is always a cool idea, though. I learned touch typing with https://www.typing.com

It'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

#53

If 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…

Have you considered using a screen reader? As far as I know, most of the major IDEs have at least basic support for them and there are plenty of blind programmers out there so there's definitely software for it. (Obvious suggestions like making sure you brightness is set as low as possible etc aside)

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#54

I 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...

He makes good points: Programmers need to communicate (often by text) and wrote documentation and comments. If you can't type fast, this is either going to slow you down, or you are going to do less of it.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#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 well.

If 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

#56
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

Is there a version that can be played on macOS or pi? I'm guessing it would be under emulation.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#57

Is 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.

No, what you experience is normal. Typing speed is never the bottleneck, unless you write some boilerplate code - which, frankly, is something you should avoid and automate anyway. As a rough estimate, I spend more than half of my time drafting, either with pen and paper or in my head, and then half of the remaining time researching. Only a tiny fraction of time is pure typing.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#58
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

Funny, I was just thinking in the shower how you could make a magic based rpg where you need to type words out to cast spells.
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