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Comment by Mistri | Hacker News Reader

I'm a senior in high school and some of this is relevant to me. I'm a self-taught programmer since the beginning of high-school (although I was pretty bad at the time, and still am), but after just a few weeks of playing around with arbitrary code, I was able to pick up the filesystem pretty easily. I took AP Computer Science last year and the basics of the filesystem were briefly taught in class, however not very in-depth and most of my classmates still don't understand it to this day.

As for typing, I'm a touch typer and have been since around 5th grade. When we started using computers at school (a new phenomenon, I know) everyone had to be able to type fast. In first grade we also had to learn how to type in the "computer lab" and for homework on our home computers, which I'm very grateful for now. I can type at around ~119 WPM now.

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Touch typing is one of those things it's easy to underestimate the importance of. I've been using computers heavily since the late 80's. But, I've only learned to touch type in the past couple of years. I'm going to be kicking myself over that for years to come. Programming isn't particularly better with touch typing. However, it's done wonders for my ability to communicate with others. It's really a must have skill.

119WPM is really impressive. I'm in the low 80s on my best days now. I partly blame intellisense as typing and tabbing through the object or function you need was too compelling. In fact I just remembered a comment a graybeard made to me a long time ago. The kids were all on visual studio, using intellisense. My response was it was faster having the computer clean up the code rather than us trying to remember all the calls in all the objects in all the libraries.

I'm curious about this.

As I mentioned in another comment, I think the concept of hierarchy is somewhat difficult to understand initially. But it is a key abstraction for almost everything having to do with computers, and especially programming.

Programming is all about understanding abstraction, at some base level. I don't know how many junior programmers I've encountered that look at source code and see it as a linear set of instructions, and just never developed the skills to abstract the problem first.

Once you understand hierarchy, the world changes a little bit. The filesystem is a simple example, but often the first a person encounters.

I think in spite of those computer classes in elementary school, 119 is still on the higher end. You'd still have a lot of kids typing sub 40-50.

Yeah, definitely! Some of my friends are definitely on the slower side for typing.

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