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Comment by mrkgnao | Hacker News Reader

> It's obvious that simply by using that technique alone (which can be used on a regular keyboard too), one can type many orders of magnitude faster than someone who's typing out each individual word letter by letter (or even phonetically).

It probably helps if the nature of the text you have to type is somewhat formulaic.

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I'm actually in the process of learning the Plover theory. Largely for fun. After a month of drills, learning to find my way around the keyboard, I've started transcribing an old Harry Harrison story The Man from P.I.G. It has a herd of space pigs and a substantial vocabulary so it's hardly formulaic. That doesn't seem to have been a problem so far.

Makes me wonder if we could design a programming language that is steno-friendly. I'm sure many of the requirements would translate to better human readability too.

I'm at least partly serious about this... how about COBOL?

Why do you want to type code quickly? I gave up touch typing in high school more than forty years ago but have been coding for most of the intervening time. I don't think I ever felt a need to type code faster because even with just two fingers I still type code faster than I can think it.

Because I have to pause my train of thought to type. And the longer I have to pause, the more likely I am to lose some vital part of the mental model I am juggling. Therefore, being able to type quickly and get back to thinking sooner is a good thing.

I mean, going only by lines of code written per day, one would think I would be content with being able to type only at maybe 8 words per minute, and that's on a good day! But it is obvious to anyone why being able to type only 8 words per minute can be detrimental to a programmer.

> 8 words per minute

Most people who type "incorrectly" but have lots of practice can do 50-100wpm. That's my observation/experience, anyway. I don't touch type but I'm plenty quick enough. Is there a useful difference between that and 200wpm steno, for programming?

If anyone has data on that, I'd be an interesting read.

I'm talking plainly in terms of a null hypothesis, though. If we agree that there is a notable difference between 8 and 50 WPM, we should assume the effect also holds between 50 and 250 WPM, unless otherwise proven.

There is no reason to believe the "cutoff" value where the effect stops being noticable is at, say, 100 WPM, just because that happens to be a common Qwerty typing speed.

I'd imagine structure/projectional editor, like JetBrains MPS, would be a good starting point in making a steno-like code editor.

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