"Reducing typing" seems to be an important value for some software developers.
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"Reducing typing" seems to be an important value for some software developers. Is there some material origin to this? I.e. was too much typing ever a problem itself?
(Triggered by an add for an LLM that announced that programmers need to type less code, but the idea is not new) -
"Reducing typing" seems to be an important value for some software developers. Is there some material origin to this? I.e. was too much typing ever a problem itself?
(Triggered by an add for an LLM that announced that programmers need to type less code, but the idea is not new)@simulo Looking at how many letters there are in the standard Unix command line tools, this seems a pretty old idea …
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@simulo Looking at how many letters there are in the standard Unix command line tools, this seems a pretty old idea …
@xeophin Indeed! But why?
People who like to think about Unix command names might enjoy: https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~jmarty/courses/LinuxStuff/NormanTheTroublewithUnix.ScanofDatamation1981.pdf
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"Reducing typing" seems to be an important value for some software developers. Is there some material origin to this? I.e. was too much typing ever a problem itself?
(Triggered by an add for an LLM that announced that programmers need to type less code, but the idea is not new)@simulo In general, my typing speed is rarely the bottleneck of my dev. Perhaps that's because I type at a pretty reasonable pace, and I use languages with very low amounts of boilerplate (and where nearly any boilerpoint can be abstracted away) and in the rare places where there are boilerplate (srfi-9 records come to mind) I have editor support to make typing them in fast through yasnippet.
In general, typing speed tends to correspond to the rate at which I can think, and a lot of the pauses come from needing to get up, pace around, think about the problem, get some tea, sit down again after a revelation. Or playing around with the idea iteratively and discovering the solution.
Lots of people are talking about LLMs as typing assistants and I just generally don't feel like that's a thing I need (excepting the RSI aspects; I do think more voice-driven editor piloting would be a good option to use sometimes)
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@simulo In general, my typing speed is rarely the bottleneck of my dev. Perhaps that's because I type at a pretty reasonable pace, and I use languages with very low amounts of boilerplate (and where nearly any boilerpoint can be abstracted away) and in the rare places where there are boilerplate (srfi-9 records come to mind) I have editor support to make typing them in fast through yasnippet.
In general, typing speed tends to correspond to the rate at which I can think, and a lot of the pauses come from needing to get up, pace around, think about the problem, get some tea, sit down again after a revelation. Or playing around with the idea iteratively and discovering the solution.
Lots of people are talking about LLMs as typing assistants and I just generally don't feel like that's a thing I need (excepting the RSI aspects; I do think more voice-driven editor piloting would be a good option to use sometimes)
@simulo To put it another way: a lot of people are now using tools that help them type *faster* than they can think. What are the consequences of that upon your work, and your understanding thereof?
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@simulo In general, my typing speed is rarely the bottleneck of my dev. Perhaps that's because I type at a pretty reasonable pace, and I use languages with very low amounts of boilerplate (and where nearly any boilerpoint can be abstracted away) and in the rare places where there are boilerplate (srfi-9 records come to mind) I have editor support to make typing them in fast through yasnippet.
In general, typing speed tends to correspond to the rate at which I can think, and a lot of the pauses come from needing to get up, pace around, think about the problem, get some tea, sit down again after a revelation. Or playing around with the idea iteratively and discovering the solution.
Lots of people are talking about LLMs as typing assistants and I just generally don't feel like that's a thing I need (excepting the RSI aspects; I do think more voice-driven editor piloting would be a good option to use sometimes)
@cwebber@social.coop @simulo@hci.social My typing speed is probably subpar for a programmer, and it's still far from being a bottleneck for development time. The entire notion seems rather silly.
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"Reducing typing" seems to be an important value for some software developers. Is there some material origin to this? I.e. was too much typing ever a problem itself?
(Triggered by an add for an LLM that announced that programmers need to type less code, but the idea is not new) -
"Reducing typing" seems to be an important value for some software developers. Is there some material origin to this? I.e. was too much typing ever a problem itself?
(Triggered by an add for an LLM that announced that programmers need to type less code, but the idea is not new)@simulo I have always assumed this is a sort of over-physicalisation from observing software devs. In other words, somebody watches you and observes that the only physical activity is typing, and therefore assumes that the entire activity is just typing. Not very different from when new students try to learn to write or read very fast. I think most experienced people would report that thinking is the bottleneck (in software dev and in studying).
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@yosh @simulo See also the last paragraph of https://social.coop/@cwebber/116165365107259153
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"Reducing typing" seems to be an important value for some software developers. Is there some material origin to this? I.e. was too much typing ever a problem itself?
(Triggered by an add for an LLM that announced that programmers need to type less code, but the idea is not new)I dislike LLMs and would never use them. But yes, typing can be a physical problem especially as one gets old.
ETA: Not typing in the sense of "my speed at writing code is limited by how many words per minute I can type", but typing as in "after a certain point every key press hurts".
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@simulo In general, my typing speed is rarely the bottleneck of my dev. Perhaps that's because I type at a pretty reasonable pace, and I use languages with very low amounts of boilerplate (and where nearly any boilerpoint can be abstracted away) and in the rare places where there are boilerplate (srfi-9 records come to mind) I have editor support to make typing them in fast through yasnippet.
In general, typing speed tends to correspond to the rate at which I can think, and a lot of the pauses come from needing to get up, pace around, think about the problem, get some tea, sit down again after a revelation. Or playing around with the idea iteratively and discovering the solution.
Lots of people are talking about LLMs as typing assistants and I just generally don't feel like that's a thing I need (excepting the RSI aspects; I do think more voice-driven editor piloting would be a good option to use sometimes)
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@simulo To put it another way: a lot of people are now using tools that help them type *faster* than they can think. What are the consequences of that upon your work, and your understanding thereof?
I have also been talking to people who are like "yeah but AI is GREAT at refactoring"
I always say, refactoring is a really dangerous game, how often do you want to do it?
And then they say, I am just renaming symbols and concepts
Y'all I use emacs and grep and can rename the symbols and concepts of my codebase in minutes, I have never ever needed AI tooling to accomplish that. You're gonna need a different use case to sell me on
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@simulo To put it another way: a lot of people are now using tools that help them type *faster* than they can think. What are the consequences of that upon your work, and your understanding thereof?
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@simulo In general, my typing speed is rarely the bottleneck of my dev. Perhaps that's because I type at a pretty reasonable pace, and I use languages with very low amounts of boilerplate (and where nearly any boilerpoint can be abstracted away) and in the rare places where there are boilerplate (srfi-9 records come to mind) I have editor support to make typing them in fast through yasnippet.
In general, typing speed tends to correspond to the rate at which I can think, and a lot of the pauses come from needing to get up, pace around, think about the problem, get some tea, sit down again after a revelation. Or playing around with the idea iteratively and discovering the solution.
Lots of people are talking about LLMs as typing assistants and I just generally don't feel like that's a thing I need (excepting the RSI aspects; I do think more voice-driven editor piloting would be a good option to use sometimes)
Though lots of other lisp weenies seem to like LLMs. I do find I can just express what I want more clearly in a lisp (mostly clojure for me) than in English.
Again, as with you the few things like renaming or extracting stuff isn't something I'd need a LLM for, and I'd want deterministic results there
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@simulo To put it another way: a lot of people are now using tools that help them type *faster* than they can think. What are the consequences of that upon your work, and your understanding thereof?
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I have also been talking to people who are like "yeah but AI is GREAT at refactoring"
I always say, refactoring is a really dangerous game, how often do you want to do it?
And then they say, I am just renaming symbols and concepts
Y'all I use emacs and grep and can rename the symbols and concepts of my codebase in minutes, I have never ever needed AI tooling to accomplish that. You're gonna need a different use case to sell me on
@cwebber as a primarily C# programmer eveything you're saying here is how I'm feeling. I don't have any usecase where the existing tooling doesn't suffice! I am a little miffed at how Intellisense is less deterministic now and I'd like to look into how they might have ruined that in the past few years with LLM things, but I don't need anything to supplement the existing tooling.
The only thing that it seems to add onto the existing toolset is bad prototyping and bad test generation. I can do both of those myself and I'll learn more that way, so no thanks. -
R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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"Reducing typing" seems to be an important value for some software developers. Is there some material origin to this? I.e. was too much typing ever a problem itself?
(Triggered by an add for an LLM that announced that programmers need to type less code, but the idea is not new)@simulo I've had co-workers who have trouble with their typing speed, but it has only ever affected prose: comments, documentation, emails, chat. The longer the text, the more they resists writing it. Code, however, has not been a problem to type for the people I've known.
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this.