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Comment by jack-r-abbit | Hacker News Reader

I can totally relate to her thing about typing. I've been coding professionally for nearly 20 years and can't type for shit. My theory is that typing code is not like typing words in sentences in paragraphs in [whatever]. Code is not structured the same (not always "word [space] word [space] word [punctuation]"). Code is not as linear as an email or story (well.. not the same kind of linear anyway). Code uses a totally different ratio of symbols/numbers/letters/etc (I type more dollar signs and under_scores in a day at work than in a whole month not at work). Well... that is my theory anyway.

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I've noticed this myself as well, with a similar timeframe. In college, right when I started coding, I would regularly type up a 8-10 page paper (for non-CS assignments), find 2 typos in spell check, and then just ... turn it in. No grammar snafus, no syntactic boo-boos, no problems at all.

Nowadays even a short email can't measure up.

I think it's because I edit code much more "interactively" than I used to write prose: editing a previous line as I think through the current one, deciding to change a variable name or edit a loop construct or what-have-you. That habit has transferred to writing prose, and I think it's for the worse.

Rather than having a complete sentence planned out before I start it, I find myself getting partway through and then thinking "huh, I'd rather rephrase the beginning like so". And so I change the beginning and go back to the end, but often a conjunction or phrase-transition gets messed up in the middle and I don't notice it.

EDIT: typo!

I do this all the time on anything longer than a couple sentences.

You can both benefit from adopting the Halmo's Spiral technique http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/36521/963.

My theory is that when typing code, I'm thinking entirely about the code and have no attention left to spend on how I'm typing it. I end up with countless typos that I have to backspace and type over again, often adding more typos in the process, yet doing it that way somehow preserves my focus much better than being careful with the keys does.

I am really glad I am not the only one who has experienced this! It really has been a strange and annoying phenomenon.

For this very reason, I used to map my right Alt key (alt-gr) so that, for example, alt-gr + e was left parenthesis

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