Neither ken nor dmr were impressive typists. In fact few programmers were then, at least of my acquaintance.

In the 1970s Bell Labs created the Getset - think of it as an early wired smartphone, or a Minitel, with a little screen and keyboard. It cost quite a bit but was a cool gadget so the executives all got one. But, in fascinating contrast to the Blackberry a generation later, no one would touch it - literally - because it had a keyboard, and keyboards were for (female) secretaries, not (male) executives. The product, although well ahead of its time, was a complete failure due to the cultural bias then.

There may be a good sociology paper in there somewhere.

I'm not saying K&D shared this blinkered view, not at all, just that typing skills were not de facto back then. Some of the folks were even two-finger jabbers. I was a little younger and a faster typist than most of the others, and I am not a good typist by any modern standard.

bwk was one who could smash out the text faster than many. His having learned on a teletype, the keyboard would resound with the impact of his forceful keystrokes.

-rob




On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 5:53 PM Michael Kjörling <e5655f30a07f@ewoof.net> wrote:
On 2 Nov 2022 13:36 +1100, from sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au (steve jenkin):
> There’s at least one Internet meme that highly productive coders
> necessarily have good keyboard skills, which leads to also producing
> documentation or, at least, not avoiding it entirely, as often
> happens commercially.

I wouldn't be so sure that this necessarily follows. Good keyboard
skills definitely help with the mechanics of typing code as well as
text, I'll certainly grant that; but someone can be a good typist yet
write complete gibberish, or be a poor/slow typist and _by necessity_
need to consider each word that they use because typing an extra
sentence takes them so long. If it takes you ten seconds to type out a
normal sentence, revising becomes less of an issue than if typing out
the same sentence takes a minute or a minute and a half.

Also, certainly in my case and I doubt that I'm alone, a lot of my
time "coding" isn't spent doing the mechanics of "writing code", but
rather considering possible solutions to a problem, and what the
consequences would be of different choices. That part of the software
development process is essentially unaffected by how good one is as a
typist, and I expect that the effect would be even more pronounced for
someone using something like an ASR-33 and edlin, than a modern
computer and visual editor. Again, the longer it takes to revise
something, the more it makes sense to get it right on the first
attempt, even if that means some preparatory work up-front.

Writing documentation is probably more an issue of mindset and being
allowed the time, than it is a question of how good one is as a
typist.

--
🪶 Michael Kjörling                  🏡 https://michael.kjorling.se
“Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”