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    Coding Horror: "We Are Typists First, Programmers Second"

    • Started by jammycakes
    • 2 Replies:
    • Reputation: 0
    • From: Horsham, West Sussex, UK
    • Registered: 11-Jun-2007
    • Posts: 86

    I thought this blog entry by Jeff Atwood would be of interest to Colemak loving developers: We Are Typists First, Programmers Second. He says that developers need to learn to type fast if they are to be taken seriously, and he mentions Colemak in it as an option for aspiring touch typists.

    For those of you who aren't familiar with him, his blog, Coding Horror, is a pretty influential one especially in the .NET world. He's also the guy behind Stack Overflow, a new programming Q & A website that's aiming to become an antidote to experts exchange.

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    • From: Houston, Texas
    • Registered: 03-Jan-2007
    • Posts: 358

    I have to confess, I got along without being able to touch type from when I programmed BASIC on a TRS-80 in grade school, to FORTRAN 60 & 77, PL-1 in College, to C, C++ in grad school, or creating websites in the mid-90's.   I was coding for my own research, so no one ever paid me for my work directly like in commercial production environment. Yet, I can see that I might have done more in some cases if I had been a touch typer.  Certainly as one commenter pointed out on that blog, I would have certainly been much more verbose in my comments in my code and my documentation work would have been much more extensive if I had been faster at typing.  It's not a given that coding itself would have always been faster since sometimes the time sketching things out and thinking was much longer than the code that was written.  Also, using a good editor that allows you to cut, copy,paste, macros in a sophisticated manner can cut down on a lot of typing when coding also.  Duplicating code and tweaking to the situation cuts down on typing as well.  Using a unix shell that remembers a long line history, and pulls up a previous line based on the first few chars also cuts down on typing.  If you work at it you can get a long way on hunt and peck typing less than 30wpm.   

    Once I learned Colemak, I realized how much I was using these type saving shortcuts.  In fact, for a while I had to abandon some of them just so I could practice typing more.   A one time thing recently, someone asked me to create a website for them and offered to pay me because they had seen the websites I had created for myself, and I do admit it I felt I gave them their money worth in a relatively short time creating it quite fast because my typing speed was much much faster and more accurate  than a couple of years ago.

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    • From: Horsham, West Sussex, UK
    • Registered: 11-Jun-2007
    • Posts: 86

    I must agree that I think he over-states the case, and I certainly don't agree with him that programming is just typing. However, I do agree that as developers we need to be better typists -- the attention that most developers pay to things such as documentation is lamentable, and being able to type fast and enjoy the experience does make a pretty big difference.

    Main thing was, though, that I thought it was interesting to see Colemak getting a mention like that by a high profile individual in the programming community.

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