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Comment by Myrmornis | Hacker News Reader

People: don't learn to type.

Seriously, I know this won't appeal to everyone, but there is a solution to worrying about key combos causing RSI. Just don't touch type. Do embarrassing hunt-and-peck typing. I'm a professional programmer and long-time emacs user and I can't touch type for shit and it doesn't affect my career and my hands and wrists have been completely free of any trouble whatsoever (to current age of 36). If hunt-and-peck leaves you typing slower than you can design software solutions in your head then find a more challenging job.

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Except that even if I have to type 10 characters for code, I want it to complete in 2 seconds, not 20 seconds, to continue my train of thoughts.

Ugh. I met your type. Single-letter variable names. No documentation. Because typing more would consume too much time. No thank you.

Edit: Not you, particularly. But I have met bad typists, and that is how many of them behaved. Don't be that guy.

What bullshit.

I can't touch type but my code reads:

  def snmp_command(session, oid, media_servers):
    result = list()
    for host_name in media_servers:
        snmp = SNMP_CMD.format(host=host_name, oid=oid)
        snmp_reply = [x for x in session.cmditer(snmp)]

        if len(snmp_reply) == 0:
            log.warning("No data for EMS Media Server SNMP cmd {0} for host {1}".format(snmp, host_name))
            continue

        # add the Media Server host from which we got this reply to the list of snmp reply
        snmp_reply.append(host_name)
        result.append(snmp_reply)

    return result

As I said, not you, particularly. But bad typists exist, and they tend to want to type less, which leads to code that is worse than it could be.

That said, where's your docstring? Why are your lines longer than 80 chars? Why is your indent 2 chars instead of 4? What does `oid` mean? http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

Touch-typing is more about freeing your mind from the keyboard than been fast. I see my students (who do not touch type at all) struggling with their problem _and_ using a lot of their concentration / "cognitive power" to search for the right letter on the keyboard.

In addition, the life of a programmer is much more than programming. You have to type documentation, you have to type e-mails, etc. I agree that typing speed is not a key for programming "interesting stuffs", but for everything else, touch-typing is an important skill.

Sorry but this is terrible advice. Freeing your eyes and mind from the keyboard is a great advantage, copying a snippet from a piece of paper is a nightmare if you can't properly type (tiring, error-prone, annoying, etc).

I also find touch typists introduce less typos, because they're looking all the time at the screen and mistakes are noticed immediately.

Also as a Unix/terminal/VIM user, touch typing is a must. VIM is not worth it if one isn't able to touch-type, period.

I heard that before and can't agree either. Continuing your thought is also important. That requires you to think about the content of what you write and not how to write. That requires you to let your fingers worry where the keys are.

What if it has an effect on your career and you don't realise it? Sounds way more likely to me.

Fair enough. I was kind of trolling and deserve any downvotes I get. But I was partly serious: I would like, in principle, to learn to touch type; I take my text editor very seriously and have learned the language that it is customized in fairly deeply. But when I start to learn to touch type, I immediately start to get pains in my fingers that I've never felt before, and my instinct is strongly to let sleeping dogs lie here: it is my profession and if I don't currently suffer any hand problems I think I should carry on as-is.

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