5 ms·

I never understood the obsession with coding speed. There seems to be a lot of people who claim a modest change in input speed is a massive productivity change

I never understood the obsession with coding speed. There seems to be a lot of people who claim a modest change in input speed is a massive productivity change to them (and how they justify their dedication to their preferred editor/UI/keyboard/language/et al). I might be an edge case, but when I "code" the minority of the work is actually writing source code. The majority is research/thinking/copy+pasta/et al. When I do write source code I guess it doesn't hurt if it is fast, but considering how little time I spend actually doing it it doesn't seem as important as other things. If I had to pick for example between choosing to improve my code entry speed or better understanding of design patterns I'd choose the latter in a heartbeat.

politician 14y ago
It's a dubious metric anyway considering that most editors support some form of tab completion. That being said, it's useful for a new practitioner to be able to experience a language's flow or cadence without having to come up with syntactically correct code themselves -- like just getting your feet wet. In fact, I wish they'd put this up on GitHub, I'd like to add modes for Ruby, for koans, and for augmented documentation.
azernik 14y ago
Mostly I agree with you; on the editor issue, though, part of why I like vim, and probably why different people like emacs, is how much they're optimized for all kinds of variants of copypasta (yank the arguments from inside a set of parens, stick them somewhere else, jump to the 2nd comma-separated param, mess with it a little, etc.) Which, by the way, this kind of typing practice doesn't help you with at all.
Egregore 14y ago
It's great to be able to type quickly all you have in mental cache, until that cache expires.
- goggles99 14y ago
  That seems strange to me. If we are talking about complex high level architectural concepts, that should be documented before the coding. If you are talking about local function implementation, putting a comment above it as a summary. That is all I have ever needed. What types of things would you forget? I don't consider my memory to be particularly sharp, but I have never faced an expired mental cache while coding.
jlewes 14y ago
> I never understood the obsession with coding speed.... I can't touch type. Dunno about coding but it would make my IM communications with colleagues a hell of a lot more efficient!

politician 14y ago

It's a dubious metric anyway considering that most editors support some form of tab completion. That being said, it's useful for a new practitioner to be able to experience a language's flow or cadence without having to come up with syntactically correct code themselves -- like just getting your feet wet. In fact, I wish they'd put this up on GitHub, I'd like to add modes for Ruby, for koans, and for augmented documentation.

azernik 14y ago

Mostly I agree with you; on the editor issue, though, part of why I like vim, and probably why different people like emacs, is how much they're optimized for all kinds of variants of copypasta (yank the arguments from inside a set of parens, stick them somewhere else, jump to the 2nd comma-separated param, mess with it a little, etc.) Which, by the way, this kind of typing practice doesn't help you with at all.

Egregore 14y ago

It's great to be able to type quickly all you have in mental cache, until that cache expires.

goggles99 14y ago
That seems strange to me. If we are talking about complex high level architectural concepts, that should be documented before the coding. If you are talking about local function implementation, putting a comment above it as a summary. That is all I have ever needed. What types of things would you forget? I don't consider my memory to be particularly sharp, but I have never faced an expired mental cache while coding.

jlewes 14y ago

> I never understood the obsession with coding speed.... I can't touch type. Dunno about coding but it would make my IM communications with colleagues a hell of a lot more efficient!