Sorry, but you're both wrong, and so is the F 451 Wikipedia article, to a point - it was what he was told at first, and it was only after he changed to Fahrenheit that a fireman confirmed that book paper will burn at 451F.
Book paper can ignite at much lower temperatures if allowed to heat long enough. It will ignite as low 218deg Celsius - or 424deg Fahrenheit under the proper conditions.
The fact that Amazon themselves won't sell your book (or your favorite brand of processed cheese) isn't infringing on your rights in any way whatsoever.
Nobody ever said it was. They simply gave the opinion that it was wrong for Amazon to do this.
It doesn't change the fact that this is, in fact, censorship. It's legal censorship, and frankly I'd be pretty pissed if someone tried to pass a law that made this kind of censorship illegal, as a company aught to have the right not to sell anything they want for whatever reason they want.
However, it does mean I'm never buying a Kindle, even though it looks like the highest quality device for the lowest price around, because Amazon censors its books (I don't buy physical books any more).
Censorship isn't necessarily a bad word either. It's simply a moral judgment not to distribute to others that which is in your power to distribute for the specific reason that you find it objectionable.
It is, quite literally, discrimination on the basis of objectionableness. Discrimination is not a bad word, yet it carries a very bad connotation. Censorship is not really a bad word, but it carries a very bad connotation.
The fact is, people don't like that Amazon is imposing its morals on its customers. And yes, Amazon can and does impose its morals on its customers. The only way to get around this imposition is to not be a customer (i.e. buy somewhere else).
True. But Amazon certainly has no 'official' capacity in any sense that doesn't render the word meaningless.
Are you saying the censors at Amazon have no official capacity at Amazon? That's strange, I thought they were employees of Amazon, acting on behalf of Amazon in an official capacity.
What exactly are Amazon's censors, if not official Amazon censors? Is this some sort of grassroots movement sprung up within Amazon that the management has turned a blind eye towards? I find that extremely hard to believe.
No they aren't morally obliged, but it doesn't change the fact that they are censoring what is sold in their stores.
This is the primary reason I won't buy a Kindle or an iPhone/iPad (the secondary reason is that I don't want to part with that much money, but the Kindle has been cheap for a while now).
I know you can get books on the Kindle without the Amazon store, but you loose all the convenient features of the Kindle by doing so. It's not the same product any more. If I'm going to have to go through the hassle of adding non-Amazon books, I might as well get a reader designed to add non-Amazon books.
I don't see why you are so antagonistic when you are making the GP's point. It's like he said "You can't pump the gas until you put the nozzle in the gas tank" and you respond with "No you idiot, you have to put the nozzle in the gas tank first! Then you can pump the gas!"
Uhhh... Yeah, that's exactly what he said.
Anyway apparently neither of you has heard of Ferrari, or Maserati, or Bugatti, or Lamborghini, or Rolls Royce, or Bentley, or Mclaren, or any of the dozens of other super-expensive car manufacturers.
These companies regularly do runs of 100 some-odd $500k+ cars. Most all of them have cars that cost $1m each. The Bugatti Veyron Super-Sport costs almost $3m - there are only going to be 30 of them. That's $90m revenue for 30 cars.
Note that the 300 Veyron's sold so far brought in about $500m. I have no idea what the profit margins might be on these things, but that's an assload of money for 300 cars.
The story of Lot is a cautionary tale from start to finish. He parted from Abraham for the lure of the big city, and everything went to hell after that.
The illegitimate children (whether they raped him or the three of them had regular incestuous relations, it doesn't matter all that much) were a final insult on top of decades of hardship.
The Moabites and the Ammonites, of course, were enemies of the Hebrews. Many Bible scholars believe the last 8 verses of Genesis 19 were simply propaganda against the Moabites and Ammonites. It still works as a final twisting of the knife at the end of the story of Lot, whether it is literal or figurative.
He said he has no respect for programmers who cannot touch type.
An experienced hunt-and-peck programmer can type around 30 wpm. That is not an impairment, at all. In fact, a lot of the old-school programming gods never learned to touch-type. They programmed in long-hand and key punch operators (who could hit 200+ wpm) would punch the cards for them. Typing was only taught to girls back in the day (boys couldn't be secretaries, you see - isn't sexism grand?), and there was practically no such thing as a girl who could program, so hunt-and-peck was all their was. Touch-typing on a QWERTY keyboard is bizarre at first, and excruciatingly slow until you become proficient, so if you were a busy computer programmer you probably didn't have time to invest in a touch typing course.
In other words, according to you and Jeff Atwood the brilliant minds who were doing hardcore, machine language level programming, inventing things like assembler and operating systems, weren't very good programmers.
Nice. Hazard a guess about how much respect I have for people who so ignorantly narrow minded.
Because it is poor programming skills will lead you to writing less readable code with a lot more shorthand, not poor typing skills.
The only thing typing skills affect is how long it takes you to write good code.
Writing obtuse code is a sign of a bad programmer, not a bad typist.
In other words, if a good programmer is a bad typist, the job will be done correctly, if slowly. If a good programmer is a good typist, the job will be done correctly and quickly. If you've got a bad programmer, it doesn't matter how fast he is, a good programmer will still have to fix all his mistakes.
Thing is though, if you're doing the whole hunt and peck you're allocating thought to finding the keys, so you're actually further reducing rate_of_thought.
That's only true if you are new to hunting and pecking, and happens to be 100x greater problem for the new touch-typist.
If you've been coding daily for a year or more there is no way in hell you are much, if any, thought to finding the keys. Just like if you've been touch-typing daily for a year you don't have to think about where each finger goes. For the first few months though, a new hunt-and-pecker will kick the pants of you for typing speed.
The one and only advantage an experienced touch-typist has over an experienced hunt-and-pecker is speed. You are using 9 fingers (sorry, only one thumb counts;) instead of two, and the result is at least a 2x and up to an 5x typing speed improvement over the long term.
Where a hunt-and-peck has to watch the keys to ensure he hits the right one, a touch-typist must constantly evaluate what they just typed to ensure they did not commit a typo. It's the same thing, only different.
It's definitely worth it to learn to touch-type, frankly typing is a chore without it. But to think it has any more than a very minor affect on a person's programming ability is ignorant.
Atwood looks down on hunt-and-peck programmers because he assumes they don't care about their craft enough to learn to touch-type. That's as stupid a reason as I could ever come up with to look down on someone. There is absolutely no merit to it. A good programmer is a good programmer because he programs well. That includes good documentation, good comments, and meaningful identifiers. Touch typing has fuck all to do with it.
For the record, I learned to touch type 15 years ago, and I think everyone who uses computers should invest the time and effort to learn how. It's very much worth it - it just makes communicating digitally so much easier. I'm not stupid enough to believe being able to type fast makes you a better programmer, though.
Most new programmers use cryptic identifiers and don't comment a thing. It doesn't matter if they type 150 wpm or 15.
It's not until a programmer has to go back through terse, comment-free code (even if it's their own!) and try to figure out what the hell is going on that they realize the value of descriptive identifiers and helpful comments.
That's an idiotic assumption. Old-school legends of code, the guru grand-masters who began programming by practically inventing it, the grey beards who are masters of their craft, rarely touch type.
This post by SumoRunner on a Joel on Software discussion of typing's relevance to programming explains why:
I never learned touch typing. When I was in school in the 60s, girls took typing and boys took mechanical drawing. Girls took home economics and boys took shop. That's just the way it was.
When I started working in an engineering office in 1972 all typing was done by secretaries. We wrote everything in long hand and gave it to them to type. Programming was done in pencil on a big 80 column form sheet and the punch cards were typed in by keypunch operators.
It wasn't until about 1975 that we got our own office teletype for remote job entry and started typing in our own programs. So to this day I have a very odd way of typing, not just two fingers but not all ten either. I have no idea which finger is going to seek out which key at any given moment but somehow I find them.
Meanwhile over the last 36 years I've banged out a hell of a lot of code. Nobody's ever counted the number of lines. Sometimes a good day can even result in a negative line count. In fact I'd call that a very good day.
In other words, typing speed means fuck all to programming ability.
Chances are these days you'll learn to touch type as you learn to program. It's very much worth it, as you don't have to think about what you are typing to type. It's not exactly a huge burden, though. In fact a friend of mine does a strange 3-finger hunt-and-peck typing style that is nowhere near as fast as my typing speed, yet he runs circles around me when it comes to developing code (and that includes all the nitty-gritty tech-writing aspects of it).
Why? Because he's a better programmer than I am. Programming is a part of my job, but not a major part. Programming is all he does, and he is very good at it.
According to you and Jeff Atwood, however, I'm clearly the better programmer, for some reason I cannot fathom. My aunt can type over 120 wpm, perhaps she should be a programmer? Never mind that she can barely turn on a computer successfully, she types fast! She's obviously a great programmer!
Cook's point is that somebody's who's daily job requires the use of a keyboard should NOT be a slow hunt an peck typist, he/she should have at least a BASIC proficiency in typing.
That was Atwood's point. Cook's point was that Atwood's point is completely irrelevant and idiotic.
I agree with Cook.
One of the best programmers I know never learned to touch type. He has been hunting and pecking for the last 15+ years. He writes solid, reliable code. I can't speak to the readability of it, but I can speak to its reliability, since my ISP runs on his code.
How exactly does slow typing affect the quality of the work?
People seem to be confusing bad programming habits with slow typing. It's complete bullshit. Since most programmers type pretty fast, the vast abundance of poorly commented, overly-terse code puts that lie to bed. Typing isn't even a significant portion of what a programmer's time is spent on, how can typing speed possibly be a significant deciding factor in the quality of a programmer's work?
This is nothing more than narrow-minded workplace prejudice. Simple as that.
Perhaps, but there is not one whit of evidence to back it up.
people who type slowly *must* either type less or spend more time typing.
But do they type less or do they spend more time typing? The GP clearly thinks they type less, but it's just as likely that they simply spend more time typing. Good coding habits are good coding habits, whether it takes you ten minutes to document a section of code or 20 is completely irrelevant.
"Easy to believe" and "true" are two very different things. You may want to remember that, it's a useful thing to keep in mind in all of life's endeavors.
Most programmers can touch type (hitting at least 50 wpm, which is only 1/3 the speed of the fastest typist in the world), yet most code is lacking in detailed comments and meaningful symbol names.
Someone who types quickly thinks very little of writing a few lines of documentation at the start of each function and of providing comments with full sentences explaining why various approaches were chosen.
I couldn't have said it better myself. Quick typists apparently don't think about what they type, and just splatter shit all over the place. Making code hell to understand
A slow typist, however, cares a lot more about each and every word they type, so the code is far more likely to be concise (not terse) and self-descriptive than a fast typist's code.
As far as I've ever seen, 95% (probably more, actually) of a programmer's time is spent thinking, not typing (that includes writing good comments). That means someone who types half as fast is going to get the job done a whopping 5% slower (clearly, a deal breaker there), and someone who types twice as fast is going to get it done a whopping 2.5% faster.
Seriously, typing speed is practically irrelevant. (For the record, I type around 60-70 wpm, but when programming anything at all challenging that drops to maybe 10 wpm, overall average)
Even if they code test you give at the interview screams "brilliant"?
What a narrow minded and, frankly, idiotic point of view.
One of the best programmers I know never learned to touch-type. He cranks out code in a half-dozen languages (for different projects, obviously) via hunt-and-peck at 30 wpm if you're being extremely generous.
On the other hand, I have a journalist friend who types at somewhere around 90 wpm, and couldn't write a batch script to save her life.
What exactly does typing speed have to do with programming? Despite what you see in movies (the few times you see programmers in movies), no programmer I've ever seen sits down and cranks out line after line after line of brilliant code at 80+ wpm speeds. Most good programmers spend the majority of their time thinking about the code, and then a small amount of time typing it in. If you spend 5% of your time actually typing characters, someone who hunt-and-pecks at 30 words per minute is only going to take 5% longer to do the job than someone who types at 60 wpm (about average for a decent typist - though typing code is slower). With auto-complete that difference in speed disappears almost completely.
Like Cook said, even Stephen Hawking is likely only going to be about 15% slower than a person who types 60 wpm, and only about 20% slower than a person who types 150wpm.
This isn't technical writing, typing just isn't all that important for programming, why the hell would you make it a serious criteria? If Atwood can't take slow typists seriously as a programmer, then I can't take Atwood seriously as a manager.
Tried it, the aluminum just bends unless you can swing the thing at 120mph (don't worry, I know for a fact that you can't swing it anywhere near that fast).
Full-blown python applications annoy the hell out of me from a user's perspective
They are slow oh so prone to breakage.
Why the hell would you prototype in something that you can't make a decent production app out of?
Python is very good at complicated scripting tasks. Please use it for complicated scripting tasks.
I often feel the same way about Java, with the exception being that it is entirely possible to write clean, efficient, and fast Java code (I honestly don't think such a thing is possible in Python, I've never seen it). Most Java developers suck though, at least as far as optimizing their code goes, so I end up with clunky Java apps instead.
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Sorry, but you're both wrong, and so is the F 451 Wikipedia article, to a point - it was what he was told at first, and it was only after he changed to Fahrenheit that a fireman confirmed that book paper will burn at 451F.
Book paper can ignite at much lower temperatures if allowed to heat long enough. It will ignite as low 218deg Celsius - or 424deg Fahrenheit under the proper conditions.
See here.
The fact that Amazon themselves won't sell your book (or your favorite brand of processed cheese) isn't infringing on your rights in any way whatsoever.
Nobody ever said it was. They simply gave the opinion that it was wrong for Amazon to do this.
It doesn't change the fact that this is, in fact, censorship. It's legal censorship, and frankly I'd be pretty pissed if someone tried to pass a law that made this kind of censorship illegal, as a company aught to have the right not to sell anything they want for whatever reason they want.
However, it does mean I'm never buying a Kindle, even though it looks like the highest quality device for the lowest price around, because Amazon censors its books (I don't buy physical books any more).
Censorship isn't necessarily a bad word either. It's simply a moral judgment not to distribute to others that which is in your power to distribute for the specific reason that you find it objectionable.
It is, quite literally, discrimination on the basis of objectionableness. Discrimination is not a bad word, yet it carries a very bad connotation. Censorship is not really a bad word, but it carries a very bad connotation.
The fact is, people don't like that Amazon is imposing its morals on its customers. And yes, Amazon can and does impose its morals on its customers. The only way to get around this imposition is to not be a customer (i.e. buy somewhere else).
True. But Amazon certainly has no 'official' capacity in any sense that doesn't render the word meaningless.
Are you saying the censors at Amazon have no official capacity at Amazon? That's strange, I thought they were employees of Amazon, acting on behalf of Amazon in an official capacity.
What exactly are Amazon's censors, if not official Amazon censors? Is this some sort of grassroots movement sprung up within Amazon that the management has turned a blind eye towards? I find that extremely hard to believe.
No they aren't morally obliged, but it doesn't change the fact that they are censoring what is sold in their stores.
This is the primary reason I won't buy a Kindle or an iPhone/iPad (the secondary reason is that I don't want to part with that much money, but the Kindle has been cheap for a while now).
I know you can get books on the Kindle without the Amazon store, but you loose all the convenient features of the Kindle by doing so. It's not the same product any more. If I'm going to have to go through the hassle of adding non-Amazon books, I might as well get a reader designed to add non-Amazon books.
You have no idea what money actually is, just like so many other people. It's sad, really.
I don't see why you are so antagonistic when you are making the GP's point. It's like he said "You can't pump the gas until you put the nozzle in the gas tank" and you respond with "No you idiot, you have to put the nozzle in the gas tank first! Then you can pump the gas!"
Uhhh... Yeah, that's exactly what he said.
Anyway apparently neither of you has heard of Ferrari, or Maserati, or Bugatti, or Lamborghini, or Rolls Royce, or Bentley, or Mclaren, or any of the dozens of other super-expensive car manufacturers.
These companies regularly do runs of 100 some-odd $500k+ cars. Most all of them have cars that cost $1m each. The Bugatti Veyron Super-Sport costs almost $3m - there are only going to be 30 of them. That's $90m revenue for 30 cars.
Note that the 300 Veyron's sold so far brought in about $500m. I have no idea what the profit margins might be on these things, but that's an assload of money for 300 cars.
The story of Lot is a cautionary tale from start to finish. He parted from Abraham for the lure of the big city, and everything went to hell after that.
The illegitimate children (whether they raped him or the three of them had regular incestuous relations, it doesn't matter all that much) were a final insult on top of decades of hardship.
The Moabites and the Ammonites, of course, were enemies of the Hebrews. Many Bible scholars believe the last 8 verses of Genesis 19 were simply propaganda against the Moabites and Ammonites. It still works as a final twisting of the knife at the end of the story of Lot, whether it is literal or figurative.
Yes, but that isn't what Atwood said.
He said he has no respect for programmers who cannot touch type.
An experienced hunt-and-peck programmer can type around 30 wpm. That is not an impairment, at all. In fact, a lot of the old-school programming gods never learned to touch-type. They programmed in long-hand and key punch operators (who could hit 200+ wpm) would punch the cards for them. Typing was only taught to girls back in the day (boys couldn't be secretaries, you see - isn't sexism grand?), and there was practically no such thing as a girl who could program, so hunt-and-peck was all their was. Touch-typing on a QWERTY keyboard is bizarre at first, and excruciatingly slow until you become proficient, so if you were a busy computer programmer you probably didn't have time to invest in a touch typing course.
In other words, according to you and Jeff Atwood the brilliant minds who were doing hardcore, machine language level programming, inventing things like assembler and operating systems, weren't very good programmers.
Nice. Hazard a guess about how much respect I have for people who so ignorantly narrow minded.
Because it is poor programming skills will lead you to writing less readable code with a lot more shorthand, not poor typing skills.
The only thing typing skills affect is how long it takes you to write good code.
Writing obtuse code is a sign of a bad programmer, not a bad typist.
In other words, if a good programmer is a bad typist, the job will be done correctly, if slowly. If a good programmer is a good typist, the job will be done correctly and quickly. If you've got a bad programmer, it doesn't matter how fast he is, a good programmer will still have to fix all his mistakes.
If four of you were working on the problem, why didn't you have the fastest typist pounding out the commands?
Sounds like you guys suck at teamwork. I hope they don't pay you all that much. (I kid! I kid!)
Thing is though, if you're doing the whole hunt and peck you're allocating thought to finding the keys, so you're actually further reducing rate_of_thought.
That's only true if you are new to hunting and pecking, and happens to be 100x greater problem for the new touch-typist.
If you've been coding daily for a year or more there is no way in hell you are much, if any, thought to finding the keys. Just like if you've been touch-typing daily for a year you don't have to think about where each finger goes. For the first few months though, a new hunt-and-pecker will kick the pants of you for typing speed.
The one and only advantage an experienced touch-typist has over an experienced hunt-and-pecker is speed. You are using 9 fingers (sorry, only one thumb counts ;) instead of two, and the result is at least a 2x and up to an 5x typing speed improvement over the long term.
Where a hunt-and-peck has to watch the keys to ensure he hits the right one, a touch-typist must constantly evaluate what they just typed to ensure they did not commit a typo. It's the same thing, only different.
It's definitely worth it to learn to touch-type, frankly typing is a chore without it. But to think it has any more than a very minor affect on a person's programming ability is ignorant.
Atwood looks down on hunt-and-peck programmers because he assumes they don't care about their craft enough to learn to touch-type. That's as stupid a reason as I could ever come up with to look down on someone. There is absolutely no merit to it. A good programmer is a good programmer because he programs well. That includes good documentation, good comments, and meaningful identifiers. Touch typing has fuck all to do with it.
For the record, I learned to touch type 15 years ago, and I think everyone who uses computers should invest the time and effort to learn how. It's very much worth it - it just makes communicating digitally so much easier. I'm not stupid enough to believe being able to type fast makes you a better programmer, though.
I don't think that's true at all.
Most new programmers use cryptic identifiers and don't comment a thing. It doesn't matter if they type 150 wpm or 15.
It's not until a programmer has to go back through terse, comment-free code (even if it's their own!) and try to figure out what the hell is going on that they realize the value of descriptive identifiers and helpful comments.
That's an idiotic assumption. Old-school legends of code, the guru grand-masters who began programming by practically inventing it, the grey beards who are masters of their craft, rarely touch type.
This post by SumoRunner on a Joel on Software discussion of typing's relevance to programming explains why:
I never learned touch typing. When I was in school in the 60s, girls took typing and boys took mechanical drawing. Girls took home economics and boys took shop. That's just the way it was.
When I started working in an engineering office in 1972 all typing was done by secretaries. We wrote everything in long hand and gave it to them to type. Programming was done in pencil on a big 80 column form sheet and the punch cards were typed in by keypunch operators.
It wasn't until about 1975 that we got our own office teletype for remote job entry and started typing in our own programs. So to this day I have a very odd way of typing, not just two fingers but not all ten either. I have no idea which finger is going to seek out which key at any given moment but somehow I find them.
Meanwhile over the last 36 years I've banged out a hell of a lot of code. Nobody's ever counted the number of lines. Sometimes a good day can even result in a negative line count. In fact I'd call that a very good day.
In other words, typing speed means fuck all to programming ability.
Chances are these days you'll learn to touch type as you learn to program. It's very much worth it, as you don't have to think about what you are typing to type. It's not exactly a huge burden, though. In fact a friend of mine does a strange 3-finger hunt-and-peck typing style that is nowhere near as fast as my typing speed, yet he runs circles around me when it comes to developing code (and that includes all the nitty-gritty tech-writing aspects of it).
Why? Because he's a better programmer than I am. Programming is a part of my job, but not a major part. Programming is all he does, and he is very good at it.
According to you and Jeff Atwood, however, I'm clearly the better programmer, for some reason I cannot fathom. My aunt can type over 120 wpm, perhaps she should be a programmer? Never mind that she can barely turn on a computer successfully, she types fast! She's obviously a great programmer!
As long as you aren't looping the concatenation (and often even if you are), the compiler will catch the problem and use StringBuilder instead.
If it doesn't, your compiler sucks monkey ass, and you should get a new one.
It looks pretty, and these days getting a note written in cursive makes a really good impression.
I've taken to occasionally practicing my cursive skills just for that purpose.
Plus sometimes it's just nice to be fancy.
Cook's point is that somebody's who's daily job requires the use of a keyboard should NOT be a slow hunt an peck typist, he/she should have at least a BASIC proficiency in typing.
That was Atwood's point. Cook's point was that Atwood's point is completely irrelevant and idiotic.
I agree with Cook.
One of the best programmers I know never learned to touch type. He has been hunting and pecking for the last 15+ years. He writes solid, reliable code. I can't speak to the readability of it, but I can speak to its reliability, since my ISP runs on his code.
How exactly does slow typing affect the quality of the work?
People seem to be confusing bad programming habits with slow typing. It's complete bullshit. Since most programmers type pretty fast, the vast abundance of poorly commented, overly-terse code puts that lie to bed. Typing isn't even a significant portion of what a programmer's time is spent on, how can typing speed possibly be a significant deciding factor in the quality of a programmer's work?
This is nothing more than narrow-minded workplace prejudice. Simple as that.
Not that hard to believe.
Perhaps, but there is not one whit of evidence to back it up.
people who type slowly *must* either type less or spend more time typing.
But do they type less or do they spend more time typing? The GP clearly thinks they type less, but it's just as likely that they simply spend more time typing. Good coding habits are good coding habits, whether it takes you ten minutes to document a section of code or 20 is completely irrelevant.
"Easy to believe" and "true" are two very different things. You may want to remember that, it's a useful thing to keep in mind in all of life's endeavors.
I call bullshit.
Most programmers can touch type (hitting at least 50 wpm, which is only 1/3 the speed of the fastest typist in the world), yet most code is lacking in detailed comments and meaningful symbol names.
Someone who types quickly thinks very little of writing a few lines of documentation at the start of each function and of providing comments with full sentences explaining why various approaches were chosen.
I couldn't have said it better myself. Quick typists apparently don't think about what they type, and just splatter shit all over the place. Making code hell to understand
A slow typist, however, cares a lot more about each and every word they type, so the code is far more likely to be concise (not terse) and self-descriptive than a fast typist's code.
As far as I've ever seen, 95% (probably more, actually) of a programmer's time is spent thinking, not typing (that includes writing good comments). That means someone who types half as fast is going to get the job done a whopping 5% slower (clearly, a deal breaker there), and someone who types twice as fast is going to get it done a whopping 2.5% faster.
Seriously, typing speed is practically irrelevant. (For the record, I type around 60-70 wpm, but when programming anything at all challenging that drops to maybe 10 wpm, overall average)
Low typing speed simply screams "beginner".
Even if they code test you give at the interview screams "brilliant"?
What a narrow minded and, frankly, idiotic point of view.
One of the best programmers I know never learned to touch-type. He cranks out code in a half-dozen languages (for different projects, obviously) via hunt-and-peck at 30 wpm if you're being extremely generous.
On the other hand, I have a journalist friend who types at somewhere around 90 wpm, and couldn't write a batch script to save her life.
What exactly does typing speed have to do with programming? Despite what you see in movies (the few times you see programmers in movies), no programmer I've ever seen sits down and cranks out line after line after line of brilliant code at 80+ wpm speeds. Most good programmers spend the majority of their time thinking about the code, and then a small amount of time typing it in. If you spend 5% of your time actually typing characters, someone who hunt-and-pecks at 30 words per minute is only going to take 5% longer to do the job than someone who types at 60 wpm (about average for a decent typist - though typing code is slower). With auto-complete that difference in speed disappears almost completely.
Like Cook said, even Stephen Hawking is likely only going to be about 15% slower than a person who types 60 wpm, and only about 20% slower than a person who types 150wpm.
This isn't technical writing, typing just isn't all that important for programming, why the hell would you make it a serious criteria? If Atwood can't take slow typists seriously as a programmer, then I can't take Atwood seriously as a manager.
Tried it, the aluminum just bends unless you can swing the thing at 120mph (don't worry, I know for a fact that you can't swing it anywhere near that fast).
Stick with the Model M.
We're talking about debuggers, not debuggerers!
Because debuggers are for debugging, not reverse-engineering.
Duh. ;)
It is simple the engineer says: $0.01 for the tap. $50.000 for knowing WHERE to tap.
Fixed that for you, ;).
Full-blown python applications annoy the hell out of me from a user's perspective
They are slow oh so prone to breakage.
Why the hell would you prototype in something that you can't make a decent production app out of?
Python is very good at complicated scripting tasks. Please use it for complicated scripting tasks.
I often feel the same way about Java, with the exception being that it is entirely possible to write clean, efficient, and fast Java code (I honestly don't think such a thing is possible in Python, I've never seen it). Most Java developers suck though, at least as far as optimizing their code goes, so I end up with clunky Java apps instead.