Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikemainguy | Hacker News Reader

I agree... personally I think you should not be allowed to code unless you can type somewhere around 60-70 wpm. It is only with extreme mental effort that I can watch someone hunt-and-peck out 5 lines of code fiddling with their mouse and looking for the "n" key or the ";".

There should be a minimal period of time between when the code appears in your head and you see it expressed on a screen. If you can't type that fast, write it down, if you can't write it down, use a voice recorder.

I'm serious, if you only type 20 wpm, you are like an soccer player who can't run. Sure, running isn't the objective of soccer, but it sure as hell is an important skill to be proficient.

View on HN

He's not talking about fast typing. He is saying that is a big effort for his students to try out an idea because they have to struggle to find the correct syntax and keywords to express it.

I have to disagree. I would say that anything that helps get to a testable solution faster helps make one a better coder. This could be by saving time having to look up syntax, but it could also literally be just typing twice as fast as somebody and being able to iterate through solutions twice as fast as the next guy.

Also that they refuse to experiment by trying out ideas which may or may not work. Instead, they bang their heads and don't type a lick until they have found what they regard as "the" solution. Which is often not even "a" solution, but because they haven't been coding their ideas as they go, they have no way of finding that out until they slowly and painfully implement their idea and it doesn't work.

I completely disagree. The number of problem domains where typing speed is the bottleneck is quite small, and they aren't the interesting problems.

As I spend more time in this business, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that the job of a (senior or above) developer is not to be a typist. It is to assist people in figuring out exactly what their needs are, in a precise sense. Typing the results into a computer is almost incidental.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com