This afternoon I found that Jeff Atwood has once again made another post that left me shaking my head. Kind of like a car wreck, I just couldn’t look away. This evening, Jimmy Bogard posted a response. I have to say that I agree with Jimmy wholeheartedly.
The only exception to this rule as I see it is that you can’t be a hunt and peck typist. I don’t care how much code you write, if you have to watch your hands fingers while you’re writing code, you probably could benefit from a round or two of QWERTY Warriors. I’ve worked with hunt and peck typists and it can be infuriating to pair program with them, but I’m admittedly brash and impatient. It’s something that I’ve actually been working on.
Anyhow, I’m a C# coder. C# isn’t exactly known for it’s brevity, and neither are some of my class and method names. However, we developers are a crafty bunch. If there’s a way for us to do things quicker, better or faster, you can rest assured that someone has attempted to solve the problem with some sort of little app or program. Tools like Intellisense, Keyboard Shortcuts and especially ReSharper are all ways to help us reduce the time and number of keystrokes required to do things. In fact, I’d say that 90% of the code I write, I don’t even type entire words. I write I type u-s-ctrl-space and I have userService. I don’t care if you type 84 wpm or 20 wpm: 4 keystrokes is always faster to type than 11.
Also, I don’t see too many typing tests that emulate string Username { get { return username; } } or for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) very well. But even that is nearly a moot point. A tool like ReSharper can add a read only property in just a few keystrokes, and with its live templates the for loop almost writes itself. Coding and the associated thinking and planning involved aside, we should be the users of tools first and typists a distant second.
Basically, what I’m saying is that if you’re a C# coder (isn’t StackOverflow written in C#?) and you are writing code in a manner that requires you to be a typist first and a programmer second, you’re doing it wrong. You’re either writing some pretty crazy legacy code (who here hasn’t written a function with a couple hundred lines in it?) or you’re the victim of a problem that’s already been solved.
History has already shown that Jeff is quite happy being a victim.
[...] it just ends up that things work one way for me, and another way for someone else (See my last post). There’s nothing I can do when it comes to that. People are different. Just because [...]