"Reducing typing" seems to be an important value for some software developers.

[simulo@hci.social]

"Reducing typing" seems to be an important value for some software developers. Is there some material origin to this? I.e. was too much typing ever a problem itself?
(Triggered by an add for an LLM that announced that programmers need to type less code, but the idea is not new)

#programming #history #efficiency

[xeophin@swiss.social]

@simulo Looking at how many letters there are in the standard Unix command line tools, this seems a pretty old idea …

[simulo@hci.social]

@xeophin Indeed! But why?

People who like to think about Unix command names might enjoy: https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~jmarty/courses/LinuxStuff/NormanTheTroublewithUnix.ScanofDatamation1981.pdf

[cwebber@social.coop]

@simulo In general, my typing speed is rarely the bottleneck of my dev. Perhaps that's because I type at a pretty reasonable pace, and I use languages with very low amounts of boilerplate (and where nearly any boilerpoint can be abstracted away) and in the rare places where there are boilerplate (srfi-9 records come to mind) I have editor support to make typing them in fast through yasnippet.

In general, typing speed tends to correspond to the rate at which I can think, and a lot of the pauses come from needing to get up, pace around, think about the problem, get some tea, sit down again after a revelation. Or playing around with the idea iteratively and discovering the solution.

Lots of people are talking about LLMs as typing assistants and I just generally don't feel like that's a thing I need (excepting the RSI aspects; I do think more voice-driven editor piloting would be a good option to use sometimes)