This is why the quality of text messaging is notoriously abysmal.
The Joy of Typing
71–80 of 94 posts
Re: The Joy of Typing
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Right, I thought I had read you could actually enable some of the chording techniques on a standard keyboard at some time. Though, I don't recall the story. Quickly googling isn't showing too much.
Regardless, I know I could get faster than I am. I hover just over 80 to 90. To get a lot faster, I was always under the impression that I would need something like that. I have also always thought that I have no need for that. So it works out. :)
Re: The Joy of Typing
#73Earlier 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…
Oh, I wasn't talking about variable names, those are certainly the fastest to read and communicate the complexities of a domain. I was talking about programming languages that require 3-4x the code/boilerplate to write the same logic. For example, F# usually needs roughly half the lines and way less than half the characters than the equivalent C# code, assuming all the same variable and function names. Other examples are Scala, Haskell, Clojure, Go, or even lambdas and the Linq features of C#. I've heard others argue we shouldn't use these because "jr members won't understand them".
Usually the person arguing this position is not junior, and does not know the feature or language now. Which leads me to believe it has nothing to do with junior members at all, and everything to do with them.
Edit: I also think that writing down to the least skilled member is disrespectful to them and you. It's pandering to treat them as too ignorant or stupid to learn powerful concepts, no matter who they are. I also think most people who make this argument disregard the sheer cliff wall of difficulty that is modern software development. The difference in difficulty between an entire C# stack with inheritance, interfaces, threads, polymorphism, and mutable class state and all that plus lambdas is really minor.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#74I think there's also much to be said about the "standard" way of teaching typing, which I find to be excessively constraining and inefficient [1]. Instead of forcing a strict "one key, one finger" correspondence, it's better to teach where the keys are, and to encourage the use of as many fingers as possible. It's also not explicitly taught, but the skill of breaking up sequences of letters so that you're typing complete words and common pieces of words (e.g. "ing") is also very important. Fast, fluent typing comes from being able to quickly know which keys to hit for a given word - which finger exactly to use matters only tangentially. I've seen people type 100+ wpm with only 2 fingers on each hand, but they know which keys to hit, and know where the next key they need to hit is.
[1] http://www.onehandkeyboard.org/standard-qwerty-finger-placem...
Re: The Joy of Typing
#75> 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…
All that time in front of a keyboard since kindergarten, and you're output is still restricted by your abysmal typing speed?
You mean, "all that time in front of a keyboard - and mouse." GUIs and mouses (and now, touch screens) have made computer interaction largely keyboardless - most people would rather push the rodent around or touch the screen than make use of keyboard shortcuts, and interfaces are designed in that direction so it's not so surprising that people aren't learning how to type faster despite increased computer use.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What experience are you basing that on? That has never happened to me. It shows you what it's going to put in before it puts it in and gives you a drop-down menu.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#77"because you’re no longer struggling with the tool at hand." I saw this coming somewhere around the first paragraph. Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?" As a parallel, take Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) as a guitar player…
>Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?" I wouldn't be so sure. I can write and type just fine, but I always learned better in class by listening to the teacher instead of trying to produce a pile of notes. All of the kid…
I always listened best by having my hand do something. So I often wrote (unreadable) notes, doodled around, and made drawings. Never used these notes for anything, but when I was studying afterwards, I could use them as an aid to remember the lectures better: at this doodle of a flying Christmas tree with antlers, the professor explained such or so. Very odd.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#78I think those kids wrote longer and better essays also because when typing you know you can edit, insert or remove whatever part whenever you want. This I believe also makes the person less thoughtful about what he writes for the first time. Contrary to writing, when you need to visualize the whole essay first and then start writing. Which is much more difficult. So the result, ie typing gave better result can also be because of the flexibility to modify any part of the content. What if no edits were alloyed while typing ? does that change the outcome ?
While writing essays or quick replies, typing can be better both because of its transcription fluency and flexibility in editing (iterative style of writing).
But in note taking, one needs another kind of flexibility. Like ability to change the handwriting or write in any direction anywhere. How many times we write illegible words, just to getaway with it and focus on the knowledge while in classroom. Also while pondering on an idea, we need this flexibility. We don't get this in typing. Only if we could scribble while typing (something to solve) ....
Writing is certainly loosing its territory to typing. Emails replaced letters, editing softwares, etc. But IMO once touch screen computers and tablet takes over. We might see people preferring stylus pens and resort back to writing. But Graphite is still going to loose.. :)
Re: The Joy of Typing
#79Earlier 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
For me, that auto-complete is useful about a third of the time, and the rest of the time it's like having someone hovering over your shoulder saying "Did you mean ...?" every few keystrokes. If a person did that to me I'd tell them to shut up for a second and wait, and they'll see what I mean as soon as I finish typing it.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#80Seems like GNU Typist is quite popular in this thread. I was wondering how do you learn to use right fingers for right buttons. I could use GNU Typist but I might just be practicing with wrongs fingers.