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The Rise of Whatever

(eev.ee)
627 points cratermoon | 3 comments | 04 Jul 25 04:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.674s | source
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chrismorgan ◴[04 Jul 25 07:23 UTC] No.44462001[source]▶
> Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it.

I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press something to exit the delimited region anyway, whether that be an arrow key or the closing delimiter, so just… why did the first person even invent the idea, which just complicates things and also makes it harder to model the editor’s behaviour mentally? Were they a hunt-and-peck typist or something?

In theory, it helps keep your source valid syntax more of the time, which may help with syntax highlighting (especially of strings) and LSP/similar tooling. But it’s only more of the time: your source will still be invalid frequently, including when it gets things wrong and you have to relocate a delimiter. In practice, I don’t think it’s useful on that ground.

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tehnub ◴[04 Jul 25 07:52 UTC] No.44462206[source]▶
Pair programming with coworkers over the years, many seem to have trouble with the keyboard, to the point where pressing right parenthesis is a significant burden and they don’t use right or down arrow to get out of the span but actually move their hand to their mouse and click out.
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thasso ◴[04 Jul 25 09:06 UTC] No.44462686[source]▶
I'm shocked every time I go to City Hall and wait while the clerk types my name letter by letter with two fingers. Doesn't he do that every day?! How as it never occurred to him or anyone else that maybe, just maybe, they would benefit from a typing course. It’s just one example of a pattern I’ve noticed with a lot of office workers.
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jjcob ◴[04 Jul 25 10:49 UTC] No.44463335[source]▶
Maybe it's not that important? Taking 5 seconds vs 2 seconds to type a name is probably not that much of a difference? Especially when most of the time you are typing stuff that you need to ask how to spell anyway?
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1. chrismorgan ◴[04 Jul 25 11:34 UTC] No.44463593[source]▶
It’s not five seconds versus two; it’s fifteen, and with more mistakes remaining at the end (which will sometime waste hours down the line). Because your inferior typist can’t keep up with the phone number being told them, and lose their place in the digits; and are having to concentrate so much on their typing that they don’t correctly interpret what you say to them; and so on. It’s a compounding effect.

Poor typists always slow down processes, and frequently become a bottleneck, local or global. If you can speed up a process by only ten seconds per Thing, by improving someone’s typing skills or by fixing bad UI and workflow, you only have to process 360 Things in a day (which is about one minute per Thing) to have saved an entire hour.

It can be very eye-opening to watch a skilled typist experienced with a software system that was designed for speed, working. In more extreme cases, it can be that one person can do the work of ten. In more human-facing things, it can still be at least a 50% boost, so that two skilled people can beneficially replace three mediocre.

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2. johnnyanmac ◴[08 Jul 25 10:44 UTC] No.44498798[source]▶
Not to be be too caustic, but that above commenter really did embrace the whole spiriton on why "Whatever" is rising. That utter numbness to how inefficient this method truly is is a symptom (which is odd, since these sorts of topics are fixated on optimizing workflows).

We seem to value the actual craft less and less with each passing day. so everything slows down overall.

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3. jjcob ◴[08 Jul 25 12:19 UTC] No.44499290[source]▶
What I was getting at was that maybe typing speed is not the bottleneck. You have to look at how much time the clerk spends typing vs. eg. talking to the customer, clarifying details, explaining the process, reviewing documents, etc. If they spend 5% of their time typing, then even speeding up their typing speed by a factor of 5 will only lead to a 4% speedup, assuming they are fully booked (ie. no wait time between clients).