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<p>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 improvise 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 impossible on that thing.</p>
<p>Steve</p>
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<p id="reply-intro">On 2022-11-02 00:11, Rob Pike wrote:</p>
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<div class="v1gmail_default" style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Neither ken nor dmr were impressive typists. In fact few programmers were then, at least of my acquaintance.</div>
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<div class="v1gmail_default" style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">In the 1970s Bell Labs created the Getset - think of it as an early wired smartphone, or a Minitel, with a little screen and keyboard. It cost quite a bit 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 - literally - because it had a keyboard, and keyboards were for (female) secretaries, not (male) executives. The product, although well ahead of its time, was a complete failure due to the cultural bias then.</div>
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<div class="v1gmail_default" style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">There may be a good sociology paper in there somewhere.</div>
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<div class="v1gmail_default" style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">I'm not saying K&D shared this blinkered view, not at all, just that typing skills were not de facto back then. Some of the folks were even two-finger jabbers. I was a little younger and a faster typist than most of the others, and I am not a good typist by any modern standard.</div>
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<div class="v1gmail_default" style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">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 keystrokes.</div>
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<div class="v1gmail_default" style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">-rob</div>
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<div class="v1gmail_attr" dir="ltr">On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 5:53 PM Michael Kjörling <<a href="mailto:e5655f30a07f@ewoof.net" rel="noreferrer">e5655f30a07f@ewoof.net</a>> wrote:</div>
<blockquote class="v1gmail_quote" style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #cccccc; padding-left: 1ex;">On 2 Nov 2022 13:36 +1100, from <a href="mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au" rel="noreferrer">sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au</a> (steve jenkin):<br />> There's at least one Internet meme that highly productive coders<br />> necessarily have good keyboard skills, which leads to also producing<br />> documentation or, at least, not avoiding it entirely, as often<br />> happens commercially.<br /><br />I wouldn't be so sure that this necessarily follows. Good keyboard<br />skills definitely help with the mechanics of typing code as well as<br />text, I'll certainly grant that; but someone can be a good typist yet<br />write complete gibberish, or be a poor/slow typist and _by necessity_<br />need to consider each word that they use because typing an extra<br />sentence takes them so long. If it takes you ten seconds to type out a<br />normal sentence, revising becomes less of an issue than if typing out<br />the same sentence takes a minute or a minute and a half.<br /><br />Also, certainly in my case and I doubt that I'm alone, a lot of my<br />time "coding" isn't spent doing the mechanics of "writing code", but<br />rather considering possible solutions to a problem, and what the<br />consequences would be of different choices. That part of the software<br />development process is essentially unaffected by how good one is as a<br />typist, and I expect that the effect would be even more pronounced for<br />someone using something like an ASR-33 and edlin, than a modern<br />computer and visual editor. Again, the longer it takes to revise<br />something, the more it makes sense to get it right on the first<br />attempt, even if that means some preparatory work up-front.<br /><br />Writing documentation is probably more an issue of mindset and being<br />allowed the time, than it is a question of how good one is as a<br />typist.<br /><br />-- <br />🪶 Michael Kjörling 🏡 <a href="https://michael.kjorling.se" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://michael.kjorling.se</a><br />"Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?"<br /><br /></blockquote>
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