Show HN: How fast can you type code? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: How fast can you type code?

codingspeedtest.com

6 pointsdominicwhyte10 comments

Hey kids, it's ol' grayhair here. Please don't type fast. You'll end up like me, with both forearms on fire at the mere thought of blazing out 1MLOC in an afternoon. RSI seriously sucks.

Better goal: think through what you're doing, take it easy on the typing. Write less code, with fewer bugs, that compiles the first time.

Or, y'know, don't listen. Type fast & hard, burn out those arms. You'll eventually learn to think through things, or you'll quit the industry.

Sidenote, the really shitty thing about RSI is that every repetitive motion involving your hands will eventually hurt within a minute. And I do mean sex stuff.

Only when having to write code manually do I fully appreciate the awesomeness of autocomplete.

Hey everyone!

This is a (hopefully) fun July 4th weekend project I put together. I shared the site at work and it's led to some fierce competition... the current high score is 70 "words" per minute for JS.

That's a joke, isn't it? It says "Software Intern Please invert a binary tree instead... You type C at 17 words/minute (185 chars/minute) with 100% accuracy."

Yes, definitely a joke :D You get a different message depending on the words/min typed

I see ;-) Also the words/minute figure is questionable if I type 185 chars/minute.

That's a good point - words/min isn't a great way to measure code typing speed. Right now I use whitespaces to delimit "words" - maybe I should also delimit by parentheses and punctuation? e.g. "Object.create(http.IncomingMessage.prototype)" is a very long word :D

Not sure whether there is any standardized way to measure words in programming languages. The natural unit would be tokens, but these are even more language dependend than words of a natural language. Chars/minute makes more sense.

* > 60 10x engineer [Turns out they do exist, after all.]

* > 50 Distinguished engineer [Jeff Dean would be proud.]

* > 40 Staff engineer [That was fast.]

* > 30 Senior engineer [Not bad but.. where would you be without Stack Overflow?]

* > 20 Junior engineer [You type fast... just don't break prod.]

* > 10 Software Intern [Please invert a binary tree instead...]

* <= 10 Hello, world [Back to the programming whiteboard...]

full list. I'm ~ 50wpm and it was apparent that I never maintain that speed except for short bursts. I consider myself on the slower side compared to some people I've worked with before. I have never had any motivation to type code faster FWIW.

Yay I get to be a distinguished engineer!

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