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I don't think this was any different ten or fifteen years ago when I was in high school. We even had actual keyboarding classes and Mavis Beacon and everything

I don't think this was any different ten or fifteen years ago when I was in high school. We even had actual keyboarding classes and Mavis Beacon and everything, and I wasn't able to consistently touch type until about a year and a half into my first job as a software engineer. This was coincidentally about when I started using IBM-layout mechanical keyboards almost exclusively; I'm still regularly thrown for a loop when I switch to keyboards with other layouts, so I probably am still not actually touch typing properly, I just have built up enough muscle memory that I get by on the particular hardware I spend 8-12 hours a day hammering. As far as pathing goes, and specifically the use of the particular convention we have around . and .. meaning present directory and parent directory, I'm not sure I was even exposed to that until I took a C/Unix programming course in college and had to get used to navigating a Linux file system in a terminal. The first computer I ever had started out with some type of Curses-style DOS shell that abstracted most of the nitty gritty details, and from there went to Windows 95->98->XP->Vista->7. As a regular PC user on Windows, you don't deal with the command prompt, you deal with the file explorer and the save/open file dialogs. When I started programming in high school, it was QBasic, then VB6, then basic C++ with Visual C++ 6 and Bloodshed, then Java working out of an IDE (JCreator or Netbeans?), and again, pathing was not particularly emphasized. Building out student-level projects, I think I just dumped whatever files I needed in the cwd, or in paths under that tree, or popped open file picker GUIs. You really have to live and breathe this stuff day in and day out for a while to internalize it, and I wouldn't say I was really comfortable until maybe a year or so into being a "professional" programmer.

matt_j 8y ago
I finished high school in the late 90s and we learned to touch type on mechanical typewriters for 2 years. I'm not the fastest typist in the world, but it sure is a skill I've put to use every day of my life. Programming is a little different from typing prose, and intellisense helps if you're using an IDE that supports it, but even then, a few characters > tab > a few more characters > tab, it really helps to be able to hit those keys without looking. If there was one skill I wish I'd learned as a young 'un it's how to use a proper text editor. I was 32 before I used Vim for the first time. I'm getting better at it, slowly, but I wish I'd been exposed when I was younger to give that skill a good decade of exercise.
- u801e 8y ago
  > I was 32 before I used Vim for the first time. I'm getting better at it, slowly, but I wish I'd been exposed when I was younger to give that skill a good decade of exercise. You'll get there. I switched to CS as a second career in my late 20s and first learned the basics of vim a year later. I'm quite proficient with it now more than a decade later :)

matt_j 8y ago

I finished high school in the late 90s and we learned to touch type on mechanical typewriters for 2 years. I'm not the fastest typist in the world, but it sure is a skill I've put to use every day of my life. Programming is a little different from typing prose, and intellisense helps if you're using an IDE that supports it, but even then, a few characters > tab > a few more characters > tab, it really helps to be able to hit those keys without looking. If there was one skill I wish I'd learned as a young 'un it's how to use a proper text editor. I was 32 before I used Vim for the first time. I'm getting better at it, slowly, but I wish I'd been exposed when I was younger to give that skill a good decade of exercise.

u801e 8y ago
> I was 32 before I used Vim for the first time. I'm getting better at it, slowly, but I wish I'd been exposed when I was younger to give that skill a good decade of exercise. You'll get there. I switched to CS as a second career in my late 20s and first learned the basics of vim a year later. I'm quite proficient with it now more than a decade later :)