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Admittedly I couldn't stand to read the whole article. His obsession with typewriters seems to have influenced his taste in font size and family. My question t
by coderdude 17y ago
Admittedly I couldn't stand to read the whole article. His obsession with typewriters seems to have influenced his taste in font size and family.
My question to others based on what I read is how many people here, without looking, can type quickly and accurately but choose to not follow the homerow practice? I type very quickly, and hardly ever need to press backspace. I usually only look when I type in 16 character passwords with alternating caps.
- Tagith 17y agoI've never been successful with the home row method, I'll admit; it has always caused severe pain in my wrists. That said, I can type at least 90 wpm without looking at the keys, and that suits me just fine.
- nzmsv 17y agoOn most keyboards it is very hard to touch-type while programming. Seriously, I just can't enter a curly brace while keeping my hands on the home row. It hurts :) And once you move that hand, repositioning it takes time. The other reason I never learned to type properly is that I just get bored. I tried several times, and always gave up. It just feels like a waste typing fjfjfjfjfjfj when I could be entering code. Finally, the productivity of a coder isn't how fast he/she can type. It's how well they think, which is mostly inversely related to WPM.
- endtime 17y ago>It's how well they think, which is mostly inversely related to WPM. That's an...interesting claim. Why do you think typing ability is negatively correlated with intelligence?
- khafra 17y agoI, for one, can type almost 80wpm and am dumb as a rock. I can never solve logic puzzles, and struggle with debugging when writing one-page scripts in Python.
- alanthonyc 17y agoUpvoted, for making me chuckle. But I'm pretty sure that typing speed and programming ability are not-correlated, most definitely not inversely related.
- nzmsv 17y ago"Correlation does not equal causation" Also, I really should learn to type better. This though got me googling. I found some discussion on the topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=952745 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=952745 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510087 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510087 Also, I seem to remember someone posting a webapp typing tutor. Does anyone remember the name?
- nzmsv 17y agoNot so much typing ability as actual typing output. And this was supposed to be only half-serious :) What I meant was that it's better to spend some time solving the problem in your head, rather than bang out line after line of bad code. So, in essence, the typing speed is not the bottleneck of coding productivity. Of course, a proper study on this would be a better argument than just me making stuff up.
- ghshephard 17y agoJust as an aside this { code }, was typed without any conscious thought. As an average touch typist (about 60 WPM), I didn't have any difficulty on my MacBook Pro entering curly paren while keeping my fingers on the home row. At least once a week I thank my teenage self for taking Grade 7 and 8 typing course (on ancient Manual typewriters - not even electric. The CBM 8032 was _just_ entering our world, and 100 Mile House had never bothered to upgrade to electric typewriters. I expect there is some meta-story regarding how you can teach people to do things without spending a lot of money)
- alanthonyc 17y agoOkay, as he says, nzmsv was half kidding. But really, this kind of attitude just touches a nerve with me. I work in corporate IT and in most places I've been, I'm seen as weird because of how fast I type. I mean is it so unusual to actually to have facility with the tools of your trade? Seriously, the curly brace doesn't even require you to move your hand from the home position. Anyone should be able to do that, unless you have problems with your pinky finger. This reply is degenerating into a rant, so I apologize, but so many times I've been tagged as "the fast one", with the implication being that I'm not thorough. Guess what? Speed means more iterations, means I'm doing more in less time. And it doesn't preclude "thinking things through" either. </rant>...back to your regularly scheduled, pre-new year's eve reading. EDIT: Oh, and I hate the mouse.
- xtho 17y agoIt turns out he is a vimmer. I fully support his argument. BTW there is even a snippet/plugin that turns VIM into a typewriter by disabling any movement keys.
- Jach 17y agoThat explains why he said "You keep the fingers of your left hand on the ASDF keys and the fingers of your right hand on the HJKL keys." I haven't met any touch typists who didn't know the right hand is supposed to rest on the jkl; keys.
- tommorris 17y agoYes, my mistake. When in doubt, do what is correct rather than what I say. My typewriter homekey bindings have been wrecked by Vim use.
- Jach 17y agoI found it an amusing mistake, and I too love vim and I wish the hjkl standard was everywhere.
- ComputerGuru 17y agoLet me introduce myself. I'm a touch typist, and I keep my right hand on the AOEU keys and my left on the HTNS keys. Cheers!
- Jach 17y agoReversed Dvorak? Awesome. I greatly respect Dvorak, I just could never muster the patience of getting my speed in it up to the 80-100 I range in qwerty. Going back to 5-10 wpm isn't fun.
- ComputerGuru 17y agoOh god... No, it's Dvorak... but I don't know my left hand from my right. Actually, it's a common joke around these parts that people originally from Jerusalem can't tell the difference between right & left. Taxis there are known for turning the opposite direction of what you ask for given just how bad it is.
- imd 17y agoSounds like a contrived reason not to read an article. View->Page Style->No Style. To each their own, but I think anyone who makes a living by their hands ought to do the utmost to protect them from harm. Proper typing posture staves off cumulative trauma injuries.
- coderdude 17y agoI also could have held ctrl and used the wheel on my mouse to make the font bigger. That was not the point of my comment.