Atomic brain to power, fingers to speed…

I’m not a touch typer, but I am a pretty fast (8-finger or so) typer after 20 years of keyboarding, and I don’t actually have to look at the keys much. Of course, most of the kind of typing that I do is quite different from actual written English – it tends to involve a lot more {} () ; kind of things.

Anyway, today a co-worker and I were sitting at the same PC doing an exercise for a course we’re taking, and I was doing the typing. He remarked that I was a really fast typer. The exercise was easy, so I pretty much had it all in my brain – I was just reading from the internal script, as it were, and the fingers were just the output mechanism. (The internal script, btw, is not laid out in a linear fashion. I write my code the same way everyone does – skeleton followed by bits of body.)

It dawned on me that this is the way I do most of my programming – once I have the idea figured out, I just have to send the data to my fingers. And this is why I have to type quickly – to do otherwise seems absurdly slow when the work is clearly already done and just needs to get into the computer. It also explains why I get almost all my work done in about 3 hours a day. 🙂

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