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I am somewhat surprised how important fast typing seems to be for computer users, mainly developers. It is never the typing that is my personal bottleneck. As

by _Donny 8y ago

I am somewhat surprised how important fast typing seems to be for computer users, mainly developers. It is never the typing that is my personal bottleneck. As a developer, I spend perhaps 99% of my time thinking of the problem, before actually writing the best and most concise solution. When writing reports or other academic papers, I first construct the sentences before writing them slowly while reading out loud. I guess this is personal preference, but I think it is worth the time to type slowly, instead of letting the fingers do the thinking.

ryl00 8y ago
I'm not surprised, given the power of the CLI and the composibility of tools like grep, awk, sed, find, etc. IDEs are great, but sometimes what you need to do just isn't already defined in a GUI checkbox or menu item...
- gizmo686 8y ago
  Even with CLI tools, you rarely spend most of your time typing, but rather looking at the output. Knowing how to modify and rerun previous commands is far more important for CLI fluency than typing speed. (things like ^r, !!, !*, etc...) In fact, I have noticed that my default hand posistion has shifted to placing my left hand on the bottom left corner of the keyboard (thumb on logo-key, pinky on shift), because that is where I need it for shortcuts. Sometimes I shift to a normal typing stance (such as making this comment), when I actually need to bang out a large amount of text, but that is the minority of what I need to do when programming.
bjourne 8y ago
To write good code, you need to write a lot of code that you throw away. Draft after draft. After a few such trials, the correct formulation of the code becomes apparent. Writing it right on the first try wouldn't have been possible. If one isn't a quick typist, there is more resistance involved in this writing and rewriting process, whereas for one that is, rewriting isn't as costly.
ataturk 8y ago
As a tech lead, I am consistently surprised how many developers could improve their work throughput just by learning to type better! The people who can't type code slower, don't answer emails or instant messages well, and generally are fighting the system instead of flowing with it.

by _Donny 8y ago

ryl00 8y ago

I'm not surprised, given the power of the CLI and the composibility of tools like grep, awk, sed, find, etc. IDEs are great, but sometimes what you need to do just isn't already defined in a GUI checkbox or menu item...

gizmo686 8y ago
Even with CLI tools, you rarely spend most of your time typing, but rather looking at the output. Knowing how to modify and rerun previous commands is far more important for CLI fluency than typing speed. (things like ^r, !!, !*, etc...) In fact, I have noticed that my default hand posistion has shifted to placing my left hand on the bottom left corner of the keyboard (thumb on logo-key, pinky on shift), because that is where I need it for shortcuts. Sometimes I shift to a normal typing stance (such as making this comment), when I actually need to bang out a large amount of text, but that is the minority of what I need to do when programming.

bjourne 8y ago

To write good code, you need to write a lot of code that you throw away. Draft after draft. After a few such trials, the correct formulation of the code becomes apparent. Writing it right on the first try wouldn't have been possible. If one isn't a quick typist, there is more resistance involved in this writing and rewriting process, whereas for one that is, rewriting isn't as costly.

ataturk 8y ago

As a tech lead, I am consistently surprised how many developers could improve their work throughput just by learning to type better! The people who can't type code slower, don't answer emails or instant messages well, and generally are fighting the system instead of flowing with it.