The Right Tools

[andrewducker]

Spent an hour this morning sorting out the bit of "garden" front of the flat with some thin garden gloves and some awful cheap shears.

Then went to B&Q, got a decent pruner and some thick gloves, and got the rest done twice as fast, and with a much better result.

Note To Self: you don't buy cheap computer components, don't buy cheap DIY stuff.

I then read this article about how important fast-typing speed is as a coder, went here and tried out their typing-speed test. Which was a bastard, as it's full of non-standard spellings. but I got 62WPM and only one mistake (on word 4), so I feel quite good about that.

Comments

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

52, no mistakes. What are the non-standard spellings though? They all looked normal to me!

[andrewducker]

*checks*
Aaah, it's different text each time!

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

Goodness, that article was .. strident.

I touch-type test between 105 and 120wpm, depending on the source text and how badly they penalize you for errors (ie, whether or not I actually care enough to backspace and correct them). (I cannot, *cannot* make myself double-space after a period, and most online typing tests still try to enforce that; many will call everything after that miss an off-by-one error.) I've also had months where I was reduced to typing one-handed (or, in one particularly fun instance, two-fingers-on-one-handed), at which I am, oh, about 30 wpm. The difference is annoying, but I wouldn't call it crippling. If programming is anything like writing, you spend a lot of time staring at the wall and thinking anyway. What he's talking about with the whole "non-touch-typing programmers don't work enough!!" is not non-touch-typing programmers, I bet, it's lazy programmers; someone who really wanted to would find their own workarounds....

http://www.typingtest.com has a better speed-test, including letting you pick the text you want to use.

[andrewducker]

Finally got around to trying that one (and being delighted it had a FB app) - and got 62WPM - would have been 65 if I'd been allowed to backspace and fix a couple of punctuation mistakes!

[nmg.livejournal.com]

64 wpm, no mistakes.

Quite surprised by that, since I had to go back and edit some text I'd mistyped.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Agree wholeheartedly on tools.

Disagree on the touch typing. (and the guy sounds like a dick).

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

...and now that I have made my ever-so-unsubtle joke, I'll say *why* I disagree. Bad programmers are bad programmers - the flaw isn't in the speed of cranking out the code, it's in the thinking. And maybe, if you can type fast you may just do that - rather than either write something more abstract or write a code generation tool to do the job right this time and the next 100 times.

I am a famously bad typist (touch-typing is beyond me, gives me hand cramps, too). Originally it was semi-deliberate. Typing was what girls with no better prospects/ambition/brains did...

I extensively comment, test, document and converse and communicate. I seem to be a distinctly better than average developer, but I lack the overwhelming interest to be a truly great one.

If you ask me, then what makes the difference between good and bad developers is partly a set of innate aptitudes (logic, abstraction, communication, optimisation, pragamtism), and starting very early to develop those into skills. I started at 9 (maybe 8 - 1980, anyway) and was doing Z80 assembler within the year. I was writing my own primitive database systems and something resembling hyperlinks before my teens.

I know a few other people who also started young and there really is a difference - a fluency, and agility. Like learning languages or sports/dance/drawing/painting/music when you are young.

of course I could be totally deluded :-).

45 wpm by the way - not quite as dreadful as I feared. that's on a laptop key board (yick!).

[andrewducker]

I agree he's over-egging things, but fast typers do tend to be more involved in the discussions of things - 40 WPM is just fine for that though. It's the hunt-peckers that are the problem.