spir wrote: > Actually, do you know any editor _without_ this feature? Notepad! I don't think elvis or gedit do either, all three of which I've used for code in the past.
> But the actual issue is not about time at all, instead plain > human laziness There is more to it than laziness - it is frustrating to be stuck on a stupid issue or have to do a lame activity, even if it takes very little time. When writing PHP, I find reaching for the $ every few characters to be really annoying, and that puts me in a state of mind where everything is annoying, and eventually I just want to quit. (The worst thing is every other time, I hit # instead of $. Aaargh!) I find templates in C++ to be similarly annoying. template Mtypename T> DRAT! template ,typename T> SON OF A BITCH! Then it's just visually ugly. But series of regular letters are very different than special shifted characters. There's cases where less resistant typing, less verbosity, etc. is a bonus, even independently of reducing mental load, or needless redundancy, (all benefits orthogonal to the typing issue) despite the objective time spent being very small. But shortening regular words into shorter (and made-up)words really isn't one of them, especially since it is a non-issue with so many simple and common editors. > My guess is programmers spend ~ half of their time thinking, a > quarter of their time controlling & another quarter fixing; > the rest, typing. I don't know about that! If my personal vices are any indication, it is more like half watching television, a quarter doing pointless bike-shed flamewars on usenet, a quarter discussing Star Trek on forums, and the rest doing real work :-P
