of touch typing and programming

Leonid had written about touchtyping and I ended up putting in such a big comment that I thought it might as well qualify as an indendent post! 🙂

I learnt touch typing in school days – its one of the (very few) thing my Dad had really bugged me to learn (and he was the guy who rarely ever bugged me to do anything) – even though I felt it was the most boring useless skill I’d never need!

Hmm… now that I think of it, I think its pretty incredible… I wonder if he somehow knew that years later I’d get into computers*, though in my schooldays (in India around 1990) they weren’t really very common at all. I went to this institute on 16th cross in Malleswaram near MES college, and started from asdf amidst all the clack-clack of mechanical typewriters. I didn’t go till the end and get a certification – but I’d covered all the alphabets, only left out the special characters and numbers, but that proved to be good enough I think. After all I can’t imagine ever giving a typing certificate as part of a job cv! 😉

I feel touch typing is a pretty important skill. Even if we compare it to Leonid’s analogy of car driving, I’d say its like a driver jamming the brakes every 100 ms and looking down to look at which gear number he is in and which one he should be changing to.

IMO a programmer should ideally start with pencil and paper – get an idea in the form of a rough flowchart, algorithm or any kind of scribbling around, and only then go to the PC.

And then when he starts typing it in, if he didn’t know touch typing, he’d be focussing on how to type rather than what to type! This would significantly interrupt his concentration and flow of thought.

There are a tons of typing tutors available on the net, one that I came across – Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor – seemed to be good fun where it integrates typing with games too.

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[* I really got into computers when I started playing games only after my 10th – hours together at Sanjeev Kumar’s house – sometimes also trying out some simple programs on Amit’s primitive Basic home computer (that gets plugged into TVs) – and all these made me feel “hey, I can write my own games as well!”, and started seeing more and more applications for it, until I was convinced that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life!]