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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure it's nicer to code on a couple of 30" monitors with 5 entire applications at once... but it's hardly necessary.

I've used a screen no larger than 13" for probably nearly a decade now, for all development work. Cmd+Tab (as the author mentions) is virtually as fast as moving my eyes to a second monitor would be -- even when working on a huge monitor, I honestly don't care, it's just not any faster at all (but I totally understand that other people find it helps).

I hate to say it, but I don't think she "needed" five entire windows open simultaneously -- it's nice, but to say it's "needed" just sounds spoiled, and not having multiple huge monitors is not a "hardware problem", any more than not owning a Ferrari is a problem in learning how to drive.

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We're talking about education, so the question isn't "what's the minimum environment necessary to code?" it's "what can we do to help people learn to code more easily?".

And I agree with the article - a huge part of learning to program is learning how to keep all the important pieces (variables, meanings, program flow etc.) in one's active memory, and learning which pieces are important. In case of a short-term memory "cache miss", which happens way more often when you're a novice, having everything open on a huge monitor makes it much faster and less painful to look up the info you need. Most people have very good spatial memory, so it's easy for them to remember that they "left" a piece of information in, say, the bottom left of the screen. Changing tabs/windows, on the other hand, is an interruption/context switch and requires much more work for the student to find what they're looking for.

It may not seem like much (a few extra seconds and a few wasted braincycles) but this is exactly the type of friction that eventually adds up to a lot of frustration and keeps more people from learning how to code. I could easily see how having a huge monitor and good window placement could be the difference between a student burning out and "making it over the hump" of really understanding programming concepts and taking off.

TL;DR Huge external monitor = training wheels for programmers.

A better analogy might be using a basic scientific calculator vs a TI-83 calculator for your math homework. Having things like the history and the "ans" variable available makes things far more enjoyable and stressless in crunching those numbers and finding those angles with trig functions, even though that scientific calculator functionally does the job totally fine.

You certainly meant a basic scientific calculator vs a TI-83 vs a HP 16c :p

Exactly. When I learned to code I did it on a laptop monitor and did a lot of switching tabs and workspaces. As for keyboard shortcuts, rarely have I found myself blazing through anything quickly enough that what I'd probably think of as more esoteric shortcuts have saved more than two or three seconds of time. Then again, I suppose it's just a question of workflow.

Sure. But it made it a bit better. Thus it was a good idea. Most of us here are pretty passionate about computers. Not everyone is. Making it even 10% more enjoyable for someone is a big success. It might be enough to push you from almost liking something to liking it.

Note: I use 3 displays (currently 2 because of moving) and I wouldn't go back.

A bigger monitor is not about cost, so your Ferrari analogy fails miserably. It's about a tradeoff on mobility. In most cases a desktop system with a huge monitor is much cheaper than an equivalently specced laptop. Saying someone who prefers a huge monitor is spoiled makes about as much sense as saying someone who prefers driving an average sedan is spoiled in relation someone who drives a brand new Mini Cooper. I could make the same argument that laptop users are spoiled and real programmers sit at a desk with a proper tower sitting under their legs. (You can see how absurd this would be.)

It depends as a dyslexic with poor short term memory I find tabbing to another screen breaks my train of thought.

I prefer having 2 or 3 monitors where I can

1 the main ide 2 database ide 3 browser

And I have in the past had my dev server on my desk with a extra screen.

I've just taken my girlfriend through the same steps, html + css and then onto using middleman with less etc. She was using my 27inch imac which meant there was plenty of room for chrome, sublime and a console. With livereload running it's a great environment for learning, you just tweak the html/css and then watch the page update. On a side note I'm finding that less/scss is great for smoothing over a few css bumps. There's quite a few mysterious encantations(columns, clearing floats etc) that you need to work with raw css but with less/scss you can just wrap them up as a mixin and tell them to use that.

yet there seems to be some (semi-?)scientific evidence that screen estate does matter: http://www.corecommunication.ca/4-studies-which-show-that-us...

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