[ianhorn]

What a fantastic post.

> Is ‘folk wisdom from internet forums’ worth exploring as a genre of blog post?

I’d add another yes here, if they’re all as thorough as this post.

I’ll add something that I didn’t see directly addressed in here: input methods strongly affect the medium.

Last year I struggled intensely with RSI. I got to the point where I couldn’t type for months. I tried some voice coding tools (caster and talon). Some aspects of this were actually better than keyboard coding. Unfortunately speech recognition is still at a point where it drove me insane with inaccuracies.

It also made me realize that with a keyboard, text code is incredibly natural. With keyboard+mouse, some new modes open up. With voice alone, I wanted to code a very different way.

I won’t go into detail, because this is already a long comment, but I believe that when we get speech recognition as reliable as typing, we’ll see an explosion of new programming paradigms.