paulmignard

You know how marathoners talk about hitting that point where there is no will to carry on? It’s the precise moment when all of the cons of actually running a very long distance start to stack very heavily against all of the pros and there is really no motivation to continue other than sheer will and commitment.

I totally hit the typing wall today. Big time. In fact, I’m still pushing through it. I was dreading really diving into some code with my current self-imposed handicap and sure enough, it was pretty painful. It went very much like this:

p…u…b…l…i…c…*space*…f…

See where I’m going with this? Plus, to give myself more practice I’ve been ignoring all intellisense which some folks see as down-right sadistic and I agree. Painful and necessary.

I’m still with it – but I needed a little motivation so I thought I’d share a couple of the phrases that I culled from the various “programmers need to know how to type” posts that started me on this whole journey. This whole awkward and painful journey.

If you don’t know how to touch type you won’t understand until you do. There is something, well, just “cool” about being able to see words appear on the screen as you think them without giving any conscious thought to directing the individual fingers and keystrokes.

If you are going to use a tool on a daily basis, I can’t imagine any reasonable argument against taking the time to learn to use it well.

http://jit.nuance9.com/2008/11/typing-im-programmer-not-secretary.html

non-touch-typists have to make sacrifices in order to sustain their productivity.

It’s just simple arithmetic. If you spend more time hammering out code, then in order to keep up, you need to spend less time doing something else.

But when it comes to programming, there are only so many things you can sacrifice! You can cut down on your documentation. You can cut down on commenting your code. You can cut down on email conversations and participation in online discussions, preferring group discussions and hallway conversations.

And… well, that’s about it.

So guess what non-touch-typists sacrifice? All of it, man. They sacrifice all of it.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-secret.html

Steve and I believe there is nothing more fundamental in programming than the ability to efficiently express yourself through typing. Note that I said “efficiently” not “perfectly”. This is about reasonable competency at a core programming discipline.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001188.html

And I’ve got to be honest – there are a couple of design issues I’m kinda struggling with…like:

I never use the caps lock ever (and I kinda wonder if anybody else does either) and it bugs me that it sits there so close to my pinky. Seriously, it is a gigantic button sitting right smack next to my home row and here I am wondering if I’m ever going to be able to take a stab at it. Tragic I tell you, simply tragic.

My right pinky rests on the semi-colon? Really? I mean, as a programmer I realize that I use that bad-boy fairly often but I can think of a key or two that I use more often like say, I dunno, E or R or T.

Oh T, how I wish you were on the home row.

Overall, the typing is getting better – I’m finding more and more that my fingers are just starting to find the keys without me having to painfully will them over there. The part is cool.