How One Programmer Is Coding Faster By Voice Than Keyboard

mikejuk writes "Is it possible that we have been wasting our time typing programs. Could voice recognition, with a little help from an invented spoken language, be the solution we didn't know we needed? About two years ago Tavis Rudd, developed a bad case of RSI caused by typing lots of code using Emacs. It was so severe that he couldn't code. As he puts it: 'Desperate, I tried voice recognition'. The Dragon Naturally Speaking system used by Rudd supported standard language quite well, but it wasn't adapted to program editing commands. The solution was to use a Python speech extension, DragonFly, to program custom commands. OK, so far so good, but ... the commands weren't quite what you might have expected. Instead of English words for commands he used short vocalizations — you have to hear it to believe it. Now programming sounds like a conversation with R2D2. The advantage is that it is faster and the recognition is easier — it also sounds very cool and very techie. it is claimed that the system is faster than typing. So much so that it is still in use after the RSI cleared up."

Comments

Probably not faster than auto complete

[ModernGeek]

The first thing that came to mind was how much useless and repetitive things that a programmer has to churn out to make things work, however I'd have a hard time believing that this could be faster than someone using something like autocomplete as done in .NET.

Re: Probably not faster than auto complete

[Clsid]

Maybe you were too young, but they pretty much created the concept of autocomplete for programming with Intellisense. As much as it is popular to hate Microsoft, they became well known for trying to make computers easier and have widespread availability. Sure they weren't as easy as Apple, but after reflecting of how long it took Linux to have tools like Nano become the default editor for a lot of config files, it made me realize that definitely geeks like us should play a limited role in what a good end-user software package can be. Ubuntu gets criticized a lot, and lots of that is because some people perceive that Linux stopped being that macho thing and finally became extremely usable for a whole lot of people.

Re: Probably not faster than auto complete

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you were too young, but they pretty much created the concept of autocomplete for programming with Intellisense.

You might have had a point about my youth and inexperience if MS had developed autocomplete for punchcards, 'cos that's what I learned on, but in reality it's been around longer than Windows has been.

I remember using autocomplete coding in some IDE on a Vax box in the mid '80s, and later using it on Suns and Amigas in the late '80s and early '90s (Pascal variant, maybe?). I know Delphi had good autocompletion.

So no, Microsoft didn't invent it, and no amount of revisionist history here will change that....

Coding != Typing

[JaredOfEuropa]

It's an impressive demonstration of voice recognition, and rather useful for people suffering from RSI, but to suggest that we may all benefit from this? Besides the fact that speech-to-text is a decidedly crappy input method in open plan offices (especially with the extra noises added on), it is also questionable if this will make us code faster. In my experience, typing speed is not really a major limiting factor in coding speed, when taking problem solving and debugging into account. When coding, I do not spend that much time ting, actually.

Codijng faster by voice because...

[Anonymous Coward]

His coding by hand has been crippled by RSI. That's like saying someone can get around faster in a wheelchair because they've broken their legs.

Re:Codijng faster by voice because...

[jeffb (2.718)]

That's like saying someone can get around faster in a wheelchair because they've broken their legs.

You might want to look up the record time for completing the Boston Marathon in a wheelchair vs. on foot.

And you thought *your* cube mates were annoying

[msobkow]

It's bad enough to hear people yelling at their phones in the cubes around. Now one can expect to hear someone yelling at the computer...

Writing is easy

[rrohbeck]

90% of my work is debugging and even figuring out the failure scenario and testing against it. Writing the fix and new code is easy and quick.

Input is not the limiter when coding

[gweihir]

Unless you are programming utterly structure starved glue-code, input is not the limiting factor, thinking about what you want to input is.

Re:Input is not the limiter when coding

[pla]

Unless you are programming utterly structure starved glue-code, input is not the limiting factor, thinking about what you want to input is.

You beat me to it.

I can type in code pretty damned fast - Fast enough that people frequently ask me how often I go through keyboards - Fast enough that I've actually had people in the room with me ask if I had just typed something meaningful or merely mashed keys for the hell of it - And, while coding, I tend to spend far, far more time thinking than coding. Someone watching me program for an hour would see 3-5 minutes at a time of complete inactivity, followed by assaulting the keyboard for a 30 second burst, rinse wash repeat.

Re:autocomplete as done in Borland C++ ..

[Anubis IV]

Sure, but he was merely offering an example that most people here are likely at least somewhat familiar with. He never made any claims to its originality. I mean, if I was making a car analogy, I'd likely reference a car that people here know, rather than the earliest one that exhibited the traits I was referencing, just because the purpose of the statement is solely to supplement understanding of a separate topic.