On 13 Giu, 15:19, Steven D'Aprano <steve +comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:21:53 -0700, Elena wrote: > > On 13 Giu, 06:30, Tim Roberts <t...@probo.com> wrote: > >> Studies have shown that even a > >> strictly alphabetical layout works perfectly well, once the typist is > >> acclimated. > > > Once the user is acclimated to move her hands much more (about 40% more > > for Qwerty versus Dvorak), that is. > > The actual physical cost of typing is a small part of coding. > Productivity-wise, optimizing the distance your hands move is worthwhile > for typists who do nothing but type, e.g. if you spend their day > mechanically copying text or doing data entry, then increasing your > typing speed from 30 words per minute (the average for untrained computer > users) to 90 wpm (the average for typists) means your productivity > increases by 200% (three times more work done). > > I don't know if there are any studies that indicate how much of a > programmer's work is actual mechanical typing but I'd be surprised if it > were as much as 20% of the work day. The rest of the time being thinking, > planning, debugging, communicating with customers or managers, reading > documentation, testing, committing code, sketching data schemas on the > whiteboard ... to say nothing of the dreaded strategy meetings. > > And even in that 20% of the time when you are actively typing code, > you're not merely transcribing written text but writing new code, and > active composition is well known to slow down typing speed compared to > transcribing. You might hit 90 wpm in the typing test, but when writing > code you're probably typing at 50 wpm with the occasional full speed > burst. > > So going from a top speed (measured when transcribing text) of 30 wpm to > 90 wpm sounds good on your CV, but in practice the difference in > productivity is probably tiny. Oh, and if typing faster just means you > make more typos in less time, then the productivity increase is > *negative*. > > Keyboard optimizations, I believe, are almost certainly a conceit. If > they really were that good an optimization, they would be used when > typing speed is a premium. The difference between an average data entry > operator at 90 wpm and a fast one at 150 wpm is worth real money. If > Dvorak and other optimized keyboards were really that much better, they > would be in far more common use. Where speed really is vital, such as for > court stenographers, special mechanical shorthand machines such as > stenotypes are used, costing thousands of dollars but allowing the typist > to reach speeds of over 300 wpm. > > Even if we accept that Dvorak is an optimization, it's a micro- > optimization. And like most optimizations, there is a very real risk that > it is actually a pessimation: if it takes you three months to get back up > to speed on a new keyboard layout, you potentially may never make back > that lost time in your entire programming career. > > -- > Steven
I don't buy into this. For one, could you possibly lose so much time while learning a new layout, time you won't recover in an entire career, if entering text were such a little time consuming task of yours? In my experience, an inefficient layout would disrupt my flow of thought whenever I would sit at the keyboard and type something. That's the reason I use a Vim-like editor, as well. Sure, better is worse, once you push beyond a certain limit, and that's exactly what Xah was talking about. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
