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The Joy of Typing

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Re: The Joy of Typing

#61

Post by kstenerud »

danso wrote: post #3

I like that the OP references the NYT piece on how handwriting had cognitive benefits...I guess I didn't read that NYT piece as presenting a dichotomy, only asserting that handwriting had its own cognitive benefits independent of how fast you could produce content. In fact, when I'm stuck in a problem-solving bind, I'll sometimes sketch charts/tables on paper, even though I almost always immediately throw the paper a…

"I think the first thing I would do is to remove the lab computers' default mouse input and replace them with the 80s-era steel-ball mice until students realized that using a mouse should be the edge case."

I'd fire you immediately if you did that. The mouse is not an edge case.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#62

Post by Kluny »

mikestew wrote: post #4
nbouscal wrote: post #2

> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??

I can type that fast on a phone. I'll assume for the sake of discussion that this number is accurate across a general population. If you sit at a keyboard long enough, how can you not get faster than 12.2 wpm? So much for "kids growing up with computers". All that time in front of a keyboard since kindergarten, and you're output is still restricted by your abysmal typing speed? OTOH, do typing classes even exist anym…

In contrast, I was given typing classes from first grade, for at least one semester per year, every year up until graduation (2007), and I still managed to avoid learning how to touch type for all that time. When I was 18 I decided I wanted to be a coder and found that my typing speed was a lousy 19-25wpm, and decided to get better. It took about a month of active practice to get up to my current plateau of about 60-70wpm. And it was entirely my own choice to learn - the years of classes didn't seem to have any effect.

Edit for vanity: 60-70wpm tested. I'm pretty sure I can type faster than that sometimes.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#63

Post by mvid »

JackMorgan wrote: post #58
mvid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When is typing speed ever really the bottleneck? Code gets read 100x more often than it gets written, and any editor or IDE worth it's salt can auto-complete faster than you can think anyway. #teamReadability

So why use a wordy language that makes you read twice as many characters to get the same concepts? It would take a few weeks to learn to read the smaller language, but the rest of your career to gain the benefits. Why write down to the skill of the least skilled member?

If you are looking only to optimize your career and expertise, do whatever you want.

If you care about having a codebase that is accessible to all levels of talent, then you should optimize for readable code. The least skilled team member is still a team member. The fresh grad, the intern, the customer support rep with an interest in code, the new hire. Why are you so willing to discount any of these members as not valuable? Just because they don't have an innate skill and interest in code golf?

Reading symbols is a near instantaneous exercise. You can tell the difference between "i" and "index" with no extra work. Stopping to think to decipher the meaning of cryptic code is slow.

It doesn't hurt to use a full word instead of a single letter variable name, or an explicit function call instead of an alias to some cryptic character. We don't use languages anymore that benefit from have a small file size. Reading will always be more important than writing, until you get down to hardware drivers and kernels.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#65

Post by read »

mvid wrote: post #39
kbenson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the two probably intersect more often than you think they do One of the reasons I like more terse, concise languages is because it allows me to get the idea represented quicker, so I spend more time thinking about the problem and solution and less time transcribing the solution. There is,of course, a downside in legibility, but I believe that's mostly mitigated for people familiar enough with the language.

When is typing speed ever really the bottleneck? Code gets read 100x more often than it gets written, and any editor or IDE worth it's salt can auto-complete faster than you can think anyway. #teamReadability

How about movement?

Typing speed is the bottleneck when you are racing to discharge a thought. It's what the article calls: “transcription fluency”: How quickly and fluidly you can get down — “transcribe” — the stuff that’s in your head. ...you don’t want a bottleneck between the ideas they’re forming and the writing.

What you suggested doesn't address how you get to the final outcome. You suggested: Code gets read 100x more often than it gets written. Well, good code is, bad code isn't. How do you produce good code?

Plus, writing code isn't only about writing but also about deleting; IDEs don't have autodeletion. And typing isn't only about typing. It's also about moving to the place where you want to type.

One thing I want more from IDEs is auto-movement within the same file. Emacs has this to some extent. Pressing Ctrl+ jumps up an entire function, because Emacs (in Linux) is cognizant of the barriers of a function [1]. Emacs on Mac OS X doesn't, and it's the #1 productivity killer for me when coding. It takes too long to move. I might stop using Mac OS X precisely because of this [2].

[1] - Or at least whitespace between lines of code or basic blocks.

[2] - I haven't stopped using it, because you can't get a Debian with working wifi on a MacBook Air. So, ironically, typing speed is a bottleneck for me when the OS doesn't have good hardware drivers, and that wasn't an issue with paper and pencil. Things get complicated fast; I hadn't seen that coming.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#66

Post by galvan »

taeric wrote: post #50
nbouscal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I average 140wpm without any "advanced typing techniques", so I don't think they're really necessary. I can't speak to whether or not they would be helpful, though. I do think it's very worthwhile to be able to type this fast - people speak somewhere around 150wpm on average, and being able to type as fast as you speak is useful for instant messaging, etc.

I thought with the advanced techiques you can get upwards of 600 wpm. I mean, the minimum to get the job is 225ish.[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_reporter#Skills_and_train... edit: Forgot to add. Just because I thought you could get to 600 doesn't mean I was right. :) Looks like 300 is still quite high.

That's a bit different. Court stenographers, along with the people who do real-time TV captions, use specialized chording keyboards (stenographs, they look like this [0]) that allow them to type words or even whole phrases with a single or just a few strokes. That's how they're fast - you can only go so far typing one letter at a time.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/AgKnqWx.jpg

Re: The Joy of Typing

#67

Post by eqyiel »

read wrote: post #65
mvid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When is typing speed ever really the bottleneck? Code gets read 100x more often than it gets written, and any editor or IDE worth it's salt can auto-complete faster than you can think anyway. #teamReadability

How about movement? Typing speed is the bottleneck when you are racing to discharge a thought. It's what the article calls: “transcription fluency”: How quickly and fluidly you can get down — “transcribe” — the stuff that’s in your head. ...you don’t want a bottleneck between the ideas they’re forming and the writing. What you suggested doesn't address how you get to the final outcome. You suggested: Code gets read 1…

> Pressing Ctrl+ jumps up an entire function, because Emacs (in Linux) is cognizant of the barriers of a function. Emacs on Mac OS X doesn't, and it's the #1 productivity killer for me when coding.

That doesn't sound right. I would urge you to come and talk about in #emacs@freenode if you haven't already!

Re: The Joy of Typing

#68

Post by Riseed »

Brashman wrote: post #22
coffeecodecouch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That blows my mind. Really? I don't find it that shocking at all that most people might type at a tenth of the speed a programmer can type. I'm sure a chef could express the same awe at my inefficiency when making Kraft Dinner.

I was a college student during this time. I feel like people my age all ended up proficient at typing because of instant messenging (not just the "computer guys"). It was my preferred mode of communication of in high school (especially since this was pre-smartphone). I'm definitely surprised that they found typing speeds that slow.

> I feel like people my age all ended up proficient at typing because of instant messenging (not just the "computer guys").

Same here. I drastically improved my typing speed thanks to internet chat rooms. My parents first got home internet when I was in high school in the late 90s, and my typing speed went from ~28wpm (thanks to a 6-week 9th grade typing class) to 60+ wpm in a week, after spending only an hour or so online each day. I had to type at least that fast to keep up with the conversation, so my brain was forced to acclimate.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#69

Post by marcosdumay »

mvid wrote: post #63
JackMorgan wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why use a wordy language that makes you read twice as many characters to get the same concepts? It would take a few weeks to learn to read the smaller language, but the rest of your career to gain the benefits. Why write down to the skill of the least skilled member?

If you are looking only to optimize your career and expertise, do whatever you want. If you care about having a codebase that is accessible to all levels of talent, then you should optimize for readable code. The least skilled team member is still a team member. The fresh grad, the intern, the customer support rep with an interest in code, the new hire. Why are you so willing to discount any of these members as not v…

> If you care about having a codebase that is accessible to all levels of talent, then you should optimize for readable code.

"All levels of talent" is such a can of worms. No, not even in a team environment you should have all code accessible to all levels of talent. That's just a recipe failure.

Anyway, that isn't really relevant to the argument of how many characters you should use in a variable name.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#70

Post by marcosdumay »

jimmaswell wrote: post #38
kbenson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the two probably intersect more often than you think they do One of the reasons I like more terse, concise languages is because it allows me to get the idea represented quicker, so I spend more time thinking about the problem and solution and less time transcribing the solution. There is,of course, a downside in legibility, but I believe that's mostly mitigated for people familiar enough with the language.

You can have the best of both world with an IDE with good autocomplete where you only have to type a few characters and hit tab most of the time, resulting in less time typing and improved legibility.

> resulting in less time typing and improved legibility

...and more time correcting the text that the IDE autocompleted wrongly.

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