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> "Whether written using a fountain pen or typewriter, Dijkstra’s technical reports were composed at a speed of around three words per minute. “The rest of the

• hardasspunk 3y ago
  3 WPM really shook me as well. Today we complain about not having enough time to work on our projects, but back in the good old days, as successful as Dijkstra was, got time to spend 3 WPM and still produced close to 7k articles! Astonishing.
  • leereeves 3y ago
    I'm sure not owning a TV, let alone social media or YouTube, gave him a lot more time to work.
  • anonzzzies 3y ago
    At least as I see my colleagues who buy special keyboards to type code faster and still being hellishly unproductive, deleting and rewriting while I prefer to think before typing and have a solution that works when I type it in instead of iterating over solutions that cannot work in the first place. When I type it's fast, I just don't do it so much compared to my peers, but I am more productive delivering working code. Writing with a pen I tried, but no-one, including me, can read it after...
    • School-Cotton 3y ago
      People buy special keyboards because they enjoy using them, not because they’re faster to type on.
      • crabbone 3y ago
        Not if you play videogames, but yeah, for writing code keyboard speed doesn't make a difference.
      • anonzzzies 3y ago
        If they tell me they buy them to type faster on then I tend to assume that's the reason.
        • School-Cotton 3y ago
          I think that’s an incorrect assumption. People are often bad at articulating why they enjoy something.
        • deleted 3y ago
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      • dmoy 3y ago
        Or sometimes 'cus it's less pain-inducing for the wrists
      • doubled112 3y ago
        What baffles me is that some people aren't willing to buy nice peripherals. I don't know about anybody else, but I spend 8-18 hours a day attached to a mouse and keyboard. I'm not going to use one that doesn't feel good to me.
        • a1369209993 3y ago
          Like with most things, the problem is usually that we can't find peripherals that are actually nice, rather than overpriced (and endorsed by shills). If the options are paying 40$ for a shitty keyboard, versus paying 400$ for a still equally (if not more) shitty keyboard, the choice is pretty obvious.
  • bluGill 3y ago
    Are you really any faster on average? Sure I can type 60 wpm (I haven't measured, but this is a reasonable speed for anyone to obtain with a little practice, maybe I'm only 40, or I might even get to 100), but that is in typing situations where I'm not having to think. If your job is to enter some document into a word processor (a human OCR), or transcribe a recording (human speech to text) then typing speed is your limit. However for most of us the limit is thinking. I can type one sentence fast, but then I need to stop to think what the next sentence will say and so my time goes down. When writing code I need even more time to think and thus my total speed is lower. My fingers can still move at 60wpm though.
    • hardasspunk 3y ago
      I've never measured my thinking speed before. This measurement is intriguing. I feel that speed of thinking will be inversely proportional to the quality of content we write. Also, even if I can think fast and write quickly, I might have to go back and make amendments which can reduce my average thinking speed.
      • bluGill 3y ago
        Linguists have noted that while some people talk faster than others - and some languages/cultures speak faster than others. However this is only a measure of word count, where people talk faster they are not actually saying more, they are just using more words to say it. (note that I could have eliminated "just" in the above sentence - to my ear it seems needed, but the sentence doesn't change meaning without it) Human thought speed seems to be a reflection on how fast you need to think for normal conversations. Thus orders like "run" or "jump" are likely to be fast as if you need to tell someone to escape a lion speed is important. While if you are planning a hunt you are allowed a lot more time to get details right. Engineering often is a very slow activity as you need to think about a lot of details but you have time. Typing a message like this I want to be fast enough to follow my thought speed which is much faster (I won't claim to type this fast, but I get close and can believe with more practice I would be this fast)
    • IggleSniggle 3y ago
  • coldtea 3y ago
    An 800 word opinion article can absolutely take 4 hours for a journalist to write, and that's 3.3 WPM. And we're talking journalistic opinion piece, which are a dime a dozen, not deeply nuanced scientific writing. If anything Dijkstra was writing his notes too fast and loose!
• AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  There’s no other way to do it for this type of a brain. I know because I have the same type of brain. I spend 90% of my time formulating descriptions of the problem and the desired end state Hallucinating futures where the state of the world is in a state that I either wanted to be or that somebody’s asking me to build Once you know your final end state, then you need to evaluate the current state of the things that need to change in order to transition to the final state Once you have your S’ and S respectively then the rest of the time is choosing between hallucinations based on sub-component likelihood of being able to move from S to S’ within the time window So the process is to basically trying to derive the transition function and sequencing of creating systems and components that are required, to successfully transition from state S to state S' So the more granular and precise you can define the systems at S and S' then the easier it is to discover the likelihood pathway for transitional variables and also discover gaps, where systems don't exist, that would be required for S' Said another way: treat everything - both existing and potential futures- as though they are or within an existing state machine that can be modeled. Your task is to understand the markov process that would result in such a state and then implement the things required to realize it. The religious call this "Prayer" Others call it "Manifesting"
  • vacuity 3y ago
    Interesting. I try to do something like this, but way simpler and my productivity is low right now. Maybe more practice will help. Would you say you're usually good at doing this and getting results?
    • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      At this point, I consider it deterministic in terms of efficacy So you can basically hand me any problem and I will implement this process, and I have a high success rate for delivering desired outcomes. And again, this isn’t really like my process I invented. It boils down into a practical implementation of a Markoff process in planning as applied to any set of tasks such they could be discretely described as a state machine. The key challenge IMO is in describing the state machine, and that is what takes a lot of elucidation. In many cases we don’t have the ability to precisely describe a process as a state machine because we haven’t defined the boundaries of the system, and then measured it enough, in enough different dimensions, across enough time to be able to give that level of understanding to input an outputs.
• kayodelycaon 3y ago
  It doesn't seen weird to me because 3 words per minute is 180 words per hour. The fastest I've ever typed as a fiction writer is around 800 words per hour. I think my average is around 300~400 words per hour.
• hedora 3y ago
  > he always sought to produce the final version from the outset This is definitely a learnable skill. However, it might be a lost art with younger generations. I had a year of high school english that taught this. Most of us kids did fine. The assignments worked as follows: - Write an multipage essay on this topic; you have a week. (first quarter, repeat 2-3 times) - Here is your exam question. You can bring one 3x5" notecard with you tomorrow, but you'll need to write the actual multipage essay in 55 minutes. (second quarter; repeat 2-3 times) - You will be given a question about the book we read, and will have 55 minutes to write a multipage essay answering the question. No supplementary materials allowed (except the book). (last quarter; repeat 2-3 times) Grading for things like the overall structure of the essay and sentence flow got stricter as the course progressed. So did grading on reading comprehension.
• crabbone 3y ago
  In high-school, I had to write an expose... something about the "silver age of Russian poetry" (it's Block, Belyj, Akhmatova, Gipius, Gumiljov etc. if you are interested). It was about 20 pages long, on a typewriter. It's physically more straining than to type on any computer keyboard, even with very stiff keys. And I didn't know how to touch-type at the time. So, it was pecking with two fingers. With all that said... three words per minute isn't a lot. At all. By the time I was finished typing, I could probably do better than that. To me, this quote describes someone who rather hates / struggles with technology. I had a bunch of math professors like this: they couldn't draw diagrams to save their lives, they couldn't write formulas in any editor, and so often we'd have very poorly hand-drawn formulas photographed and inserted as images into MS Word documents or similar incomprehensible junk. This doesn't necessarily mean they are bad at the very narrow field they specialized in, but it usually means they are very bad at virtually everything else adjacent to that field. Also, this often means that they've made their career in academia by being the first person in that narrow field they specialize in. This is also my impression of Dijkstra: he had some novel, but also kind of low-hanging fruit ideas... at the time when he was almost alone in that field. Had he started today, he'd be very lucky to get a tenured position, but most likely would end up being a TA / dropped out and just do something else. Even though there's still a lot of politics and all sorts of un-meritocratic ways of getting into prestigious positions in academia, you need to be very good. A lot of the times it's being very good at cheating, but there isn't really any more room for greenfield academics who instantaneously propel themselves to the top of the academic hierarchy.
• tbalsam 3y ago
  I am rather autistic and this is how I think, toosies. 90-95% of my time working on a project is just sitting, staring into space, completely unaware of the world around me. I think it's because while you can "explore the field" with compute, as it were, the informational shapes of whatever the problem is at hand are always there, and usually they are _much_ more simple than people seem to let on, IMPO. I'm not really sure how to describe it for me, as I have partial aphantasia, and a kind of weird shape-synesthesisa which also blends with my sensibilities around physical taste. It can really only be described as "feeling" a shape, where a shape represents some quantity of information for a topic, if it were the case that I'm not using receptors in my hands to touch something, but instead, it's the shape feeling its own shape relative to other shapes, and it's not as much a touch-like sensation as a visceral, semi-intuitive experience of the information of whatever that shape-object-whatever represents. I do not think that thinking in this way was fully formed from a young age (i.e. it used to be an extremely active story-based imagination), it seems to have developed in some manner as an (informationally) dissociative coping mechanism because my autism is strong enough that the world does not stop overstimulating me. When I am in this headspace, I am generally unaware of sensory input, there is only me, and the (generally mathematical) "problem" at hand. Sometimes I can go for hours, working on a problem, moving shapes and concepts around, and fitting them together in a way that explains more while taking less information to do so. This can be both a gift and a hindrance. I generally have to limit my budget for sensory stimulation and for 'new' things because my brain is so sensitive to information. This generally is more of a disability than a help, on the whole, though it is nice to be able to solve problems in the way that I do, that is one comfort to me. I do have a tendency to want to fit things in my brain before thinking about them, but the 'onboarding' process can take a while. I used to get in trouble all the time as a kid before this sense by trying to do mental math all of the time, I would sit, think for a long time about a problem, write an answer down, and move on. Unfortunately, instead of being encouraged, it was something I got punished for (I was homeschooled), and there wasn't much in the way of what I would consider appropriate adaptivity in that regard. Problems are fun, and the hardest part about them I think is that we are generally crap at phrasing them and looking for solutions, most of my work seems to just be cutting through the cruft of whatever trends-du-jour or symbolic obfuscation shenanigans are going on for a given topic. Once you sort out the structure of a given mathematical problem, the answer seems to fall into place well, and one does not always need compute for that. So, all of that to say, each person thinks and processes things in a different way, and if you're into information theory, then one might say the kl divergence (in a manner of speaking) between how you encode and solve problems might be very high with djikstra's methods of thinking! It depends upon what unique strengths and weaknesses you have, and that can take years to find whichever special problem solving mode fits best to your sensibilities and gifts. For example, I have significant trouble around symbols that have potentially multiple meanings (like, as is often the case with many formal mathematical definitions), and since those take a disproportionate amount of "processing time" for me, my problem solving methods have evolved to replace and/or avoid them unless necessary. That is likely a silly solution for many people! So, while you may not entirely fit Djikstra's natural proclivities, there might be elements that fit you. But whatever fits you best as a problem-solving technique is likely, frustratingly, and beautifully, entirely unique and specific to you. <3 :'))))
• deleted 3y ago
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• zubairq 3y ago
  I agree with this comment. My typing speed was sometimes the bottleneck, but usually it was my speed of thought, but often I fell into this cargo cult thinking that the ability to type fast matters