Typing speed matters in programming the same way hammer hits per second matters when building a house. There’s a little bit more to it.
It is the best one for houses vulnerable to quake damage. id rather avoid gatling nail guns though.
I’m a bit confused about the premise of the article. Does anyone assert that typing speed is a bottleneck at all? I’ve been in the industry for years, and have never heard that claim.
I do agree about the whole “less code is not always more”, but I get confused when the author keeps bringing it back to typing speed.
I’ve heard the argument as a positive of learning vim and while it did finally force me to touch type I can’t say that it had any impact on my programming speed.
yeah the issue honestly is how much someone else has to read to understand your code. it’s weird because the whole article is about making readable code for the next person and he never stops to address the fact that leaving 10x as much code to read might also make life more difficult.
I feel like he just wanted to make a point about how it’s nice to make types immutable and suggest other techniques can be worth implementing too, which I agree with, but honestly his premise is a trainwreck.
The code that I suggest is too verbose. It involves too much typing.
This seems to be the whole premise and it’s obvious that one does not follow from the other.
Overly verbose code is code that can be expressed more minimally for some benefit. I can’t think why anyone would argue that one of those benefits is less typing.
The author can solve this easily though: ask them why verbosity is an issue. Then they will know the answer and won’t have to presume something as tenuous as “amount of time spent typing”.
8,000 characters in five hours is 1,600 characters per hour, or 27 characters per minute.
This is irrelevant. Typing when coding is not evenly spaced out over those 5 hours. It is sporadic with most of the time thinking or reading documentation or reading source code and trying to figure out what you want to type. No good conclusions can be drawn from this logic and makes that whole part of the argument irrelevant.
If I were typing that slowly I would quickly forget what the hell I was even trying to do in the first place. Which is the bigger part - when you do need to type you want to quickly get the ideas you have down as fast as you can think them. Going too slow can cause your mind to wander and that can really hamper your productivity.
There is also the cost of context switching. And it is a context switch to go from writing ideas down to making sure I have all the boiler plate and syntax correct. The less of the need for doing that the better IMO.
And TBH I don’t really understand the rest of their arguments. They introduce two bits of code, one very short simple class then one with lots of helper methods to set various things while creating a new object. And then concludes with a short paragraph on some real benefits without really explaining why. With the whole paragraph being more of an argument about immutable code being better rather than longer vs shorter code. Then follows up with an entire section on why his code increases maintenance as refactoring requires more points to update with his immutable code and thus prefers languages like F# where the immutable version is a one liner… Which defeats the whole argument that typing is not the bottleneck? I really don’t follow his logic here.
Apparently, it has to be explicitly stated: Programmer productivity has nothing to do with typing speed.
I feel they have completely failed to convince me of this fact. Despite me already thinking it is not one of the more important factors of productivity and there are better things to optimise around.
My opinion is that code length is not that important a factor, but you should not go hog while and write the longest things you can either. Every extra bit of code should add some value somewhere. Like taking his examples, spending a bit of time writing the immutable version here lets you reduce the amount you need to write when using that code. Which is a trade-off that can be worthwhile - increasing typing now for reducing typing later. But also the reduced typing makes the where the code is used easier to read and clearer as to what is happening, get a copy of the object with one field updated. That is a nice concept to have and read. Without the need to refer to all the fields every time you want a copy.
Is it possible to be a productive programmer with slow typing speed? Yes. I have met some.
But…can fast typing speed be an advantage for most people? Yes!
Like you said, once you come up with an idea it can be a huge advantage to be able to type out that idea quickly to try it out before your mind wanders.
But also, I use typing for so many others things: writing Slack messages and emails. Writing responses to bug tickets. Writing new tickets. Documentation. Search queries.
The faster I type, the faster I can do those things. Also, the more I’m incentivized to do it. It’s no big deal to file a big report for something I discovered along the way because I can type it up in 30 seconds. Someone else who’s slow at typing might not bother because it’d take too long.
Also m, while I agree typing speed is an advantage, there’s nothing stoping you from laying out the whole program on paper or with psudo code and then filling it in which can reduce the need to keep it all in your head
IMO trying to write everything out in psudo code first is way slower. You are writing things out twice and you are not able to run things quickly. You just have to hope you got things right on the first pass and cannot quickly adjust things when you don’t.
I prefer constant feedback from my editor, compiler and test framework to write things quickly and make sure I am not doing something that is fundamentally flawed. There is nothing worst than writing a whole program without running it only to run it and realise nothing is working how you thought it should.
I discovered this very quickly after breaking a finger. One-finger typing didn’t slow me down at all. Turns out my brain was the bottleneck.
From the article:
(…) but recently, another type of criticism seems to be on the rise.
The code that I suggest is too verbose. It involves too much typing.
This reads like a one-sentence strawman. Describing code as “too verbose” is really not about the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s about readability and cognitive load.
The blogger seems to almost get the point when he writes the following:
In short, the purpose of source code is to communicate the workings of a piece of software to the next programmer who comes along. This could easily include your future self.
The purpose of source code is to communicate (…) to the next programmer who comes along.
If you make the mistake of going the “enterprise quality java code” meme approach, you’re making the next programmer’s life needlessly harder.
The blogger then tries to make his case with verbose code, and makes the following statement:
Which alternative is better? The short version is eight lines of code, including the curly brackets. The longer version is 78 lines of code. That’s ten times as much.
I prefer the longer version. While it takes longer to type, it comes with several benefits. (…)
This is yet another strawman. The longer version is awful code, not because it’s longer but because it’s needlessly jam-packed of boilerplate code. Ignorign basic things like interfaces and contracts, It’s been proven already that bugs in code are directly proportional to the number of lines of code, and thus the code the author prefers is likely to pack ten times more bugs.
The shorter code in this case would not be the 78-loc mess that the author picked as the thing he prefers. The shorter code in this case would be something like onboarding the project onto Project Lombok to handle all-args constructors, property methods, and even throw a builder in for free. This requires onboarding Lombok to the project, and add two annotations to the short example. Two lines of code, done.
After the blogger fails to make his case, he doubles down on the typing non-sequitur:
Perhaps you’re now convinced that typing speed may not be the bottleneck (…)
This is a blog post that fails to justify a click. It’s in the territory of “not even wrong”.
