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charset=UTF-8

I took typing in Summer School.  My parents bought me a typewriter = with mathematical symbols on it, which was almost worthless, and I had to i= mprovise to get some of the standard characters (for example, the semicolon= was comma/backspace/colon).  By the time I was talking to computers (= Model 33 tty) I was happy that I couldn't type faster because it was impos= sible on that thing.

Steve

---
=  


On 2022-11-02 00:11, Rob Pike wrote:

Nei= ther ken nor dmr were impressive typists. In fact few programmers were then= , at least of my acquaintance.
&nb= sp;
In = the 1970s Bell Labs created the Getset - think of it as an early wired smar= tphone, or a Minitel, with a little screen and keyboard. It cost quite a bi= t but was a cool gadget so the executives all got one. But, in fascinating = contrast to the Blackberry a generation later, no one would touch it - lite= rally - because it had a keyboard, and keyboards were for (female) secretar= ies, not (male) executives. The product, although well ahead of its time, w= as a complete failure due to the cultural bias then.
&nb= sp;
The= re may be a good sociology paper in there somewhere.
&nb= sp;
I'm= not saying K&D shared this blinkered view, not at all, just that typin= g skills were not de facto back then. Some of the folks were even two-finge= r jabbers. I was a little younger and a faster typist than most of the othe= rs, and I am not a good typist by any modern standard.
&nb= sp;
bwk= was one who could smash out the text faster than many. His having learned = on a teletype, the keyboard would resound with the impact of his forceful k= eystrokes.
&nb= sp;
-ro= b
&nb= sp;
&nb= sp;
&nb= sp;

On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 5:53 PM Mich= ael Kjörling <e5655f30a07f@ewoof.net> wrote:
On 2 Nov 2022 13:36 +1100,= from sjenki= n@canb.auug.org.au (steve jenkin):
> There's at least one Inter= net meme that highly productive coders
> necessarily have good keyb= oard skills, which leads to also producing
> documentation or, at l= east, not avoiding it entirely, as often
> happens commercially.
I wouldn't be so sure that this necessarily follows. Good keyboard=
skills definitely help with the mechanics of typing code as well astext, I'll certainly grant that; but someone can be a good typist yetwrite complete gibberish, or be a poor/slow typist and _by necessity_need to consider each word that they use because typing an extra
s= entence takes them so long. If it takes you ten seconds to type out a
= normal sentence, revising becomes less of an issue than if typing out
= the same sentence takes a minute or a minute and a half.

Also, c= ertainly in my case and I doubt that I'm alone, a lot of my
time "codi= ng" isn't spent doing the mechanics of "writing code", but
rather cons= idering possible solutions to a problem, and what the
consequences wou= ld be of different choices. That part of the software
development proc= ess is essentially unaffected by how good one is as a
typist, and I ex= pect that the effect would be even more pronounced for
someone using s= omething like an ASR-33 and edlin, than a modern
computer and visual e= ditor. Again, the longer it takes to revise
something, the more it mak= es sense to get it right on the first
attempt, even if that means some= preparatory work up-front.

Writing documentation is probably mo= re an issue of mindset and being
allowed the time, than it is a questi= on of how good one is as a
typist.

--
=F0=9F=AA=B6&nb= sp;Michael Kjörling              &n= bsp;   =F0=9F=8F=A1 https://michael.kjorling.se"Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?"

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