Here's a really interesting interview with the founder of Plover, Mirabai Knight, explaining how she got started and how efficient steno can be. "Steno is so ridiculously more efficient than typing every word out letter by letter that it’s possible to exceed the average qwerty speed in a matter of months, once you’ve got the phonetic system in your muscle memory."
https://geekfeminism.org/2010/10/12/plover-freeing-stenograp...
I got interested in steno once, and even designed and started making my own custom open source steno keyboard before Open Steno existed (though that's a story for another day). This led me to look in to learning steno, and I discovered that the main reason that stenographers type as fast as they do is that they memorize tons of macros (in vim and emacs terms). The triggering of a macro will result in a whole phrase, or even sentence being written out (or just a shorthand for that word/phrase is written out, and that can later be converted by hand in to that word/phrase).
On an ascii keyboard, that would be like typing something like \d and having the phrase "The defendant states that" appear.
It's obvious that simply by using that technique alone (which can be used on a regular keyboard too), one can type many orders of magnitude faster than someone who's typing out each individual word letter by letter (or even phonetically). Some steno systems will give the stenographer hundreds if not thousands of such macros to memorize.
Of course, there's also the phonetic spelling stenographers use if they don't already know a macro for a given word (or for a proper noun), and there's the funky chorded keyboard that makes it efficient to type thousands of different macros with a relatively few keys and without moving the fingers much. But that's secondary to the heavy reliance on macros.
I hate memorization, and didn't want to spend the years that it would take to master steno, so never really wound up pursuing this myself. So I don't actually know steno myself, so please take the above explanation with a grain or two of salt. But that's my understanding of how the greatest speed advantages are achieved with steno.
I'd love to hear from some professional stenographers as to whether my impression was correct.
> I hate memorization, and didn't want to spend the years that it would take to master steno, so never really wound up pursuing this myself.
I haven't learned machine stenography (for reasons which fit better in another comment), but I do know and frequently use good old pen-and-paper shorthand, which is shares a lot of properties with stenography. I also talk to people who know machine stenography to keep up with the current developments.
There's one misconception in the quote that I feel it's worth clearing up: learning stenography/shorthand does not rely as heavily on "memorization" as you seem to think.
There is a system to the madness, and most systems are fairly easy to learn (because – hey – they're systematic!) Once you know the system, you don't need to memorize anything. You will be able to type anything by just applying the rules of the system. Of course, consciously applying the rules is going to be a slow process (just like consciously hunting for keys on a Qwerty keyboard when you were still learning it), but words you type often will settle into your muscle memory, just like they have done on Qwerty. Try typing in a foreign language on Qwerty and you'll notice how much of your typing speed is muscle-memory-applied-to-full-words. The same thing is true of stenography.
You never sat down and deliberately decided to "memorize" common words on Qwerty, it just happened automatically as you were typing. The same thing is true of stenography.
So, to recap:
* "Mastering stenography" in the sense of "being able to type at a speed that is not uncomfortable" may take no more than a month. It does require memorizing the system and applying it.
* "Mastering stenography" in the sense of exceeding your current Qwerty speed may take a few months up to half a year. It does not require any memorization beyond the first step.
* "Mastering stenography" in the sense of achieving 250 WPM speeds will take several years. It will probably require memorizing custom shortcuts for words/phrases that you commonly type.
So if you compare stenography fairly to Qwerty, you see we're talking at most half a year. It probably took you longer to learn Qwerty to begin with. You're being unfair to yourself if you compare 250 WPM stenography to 70 WPM Qwerty and from that conclude that stenography is much harder.
> It's obvious that simply by using that technique alone (which can be used on a regular keyboard too), one can type many orders of magnitude faster than someone who's typing out each individual word letter by letter (or even phonetically).
It probably helps if the nature of the text you have to type is somewhat formulaic.
I'm actually in the process of learning the Plover theory. Largely for fun. After a month of drills, learning to find my way around the keyboard, I've started transcribing an old Harry Harrison story The Man from P.I.G.
It has a herd of space pigs and a substantial vocabulary so it's hardly formulaic. That doesn't seem to have been a problem so far.
Makes me wonder if we could design a programming language that is steno-friendly. I'm sure many of the requirements would translate to better human readability too.
Why do you want to type code quickly? I gave up touch typing in high school more than forty years ago but have been coding for most of the intervening time. I don't think I ever felt a need to type code faster because even with just two fingers I still type code faster than I can think it.
Because I have to pause my train of thought to type. And the longer I have to pause, the more likely I am to lose some vital part of the mental model I am juggling. Therefore, being able to type quickly and get back to thinking sooner is a good thing.
I mean, going only by lines of code written per day, one would think I would be content with being able to type only at maybe 8 words per minute, and that's on a good day! But it is obvious to anyone why being able to type only 8 words per minute can be detrimental to a programmer.
Most people who type "incorrectly" but have lots of practice can do 50-100wpm. That's my observation/experience, anyway. I don't touch type but I'm plenty quick enough. Is there a useful difference between that and 200wpm steno, for programming?
If anyone has data on that, I'd be an interesting read.
I'm talking plainly in terms of a null hypothesis, though. If we agree that there is a notable difference between 8 and 50 WPM, we should assume the effect also holds between 50 and 250 WPM, unless otherwise proven.
There is no reason to believe the "cutoff" value where the effect stops being noticable is at, say, 100 WPM, just because that happens to be a common Qwerty typing speed.
