Going through Zed Shaw’s Learn Ruby the Hard Way, I now recognize the importance of typing in the context of learning to program a new language. My professional experience in software development consisted of .NET development in C#, which is extremely similar to JAVA in syntax. So, upon encountering Ruby syntax elements such as pipes ‘|’, typing the code becomes slow due to a lack of practice, which impedes and constricts thinking.

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require 'open-uri'

open("http://www.ruby-lang.org/en") do |f|
  f.each_line {|line| p line}
  puts f.base_uri         # <URI::HTTP:0x40e6ef2 URL:http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/>
  puts f.content_type     # "text/html"
  puts f.charset          # "iso-8859-1"
  puts f.content_encoding # []
  puts f.last_modified    # Thu Dec 05 02:45:02 UTC 2002
end

Typing code like the excerpt above has developed muscle memory for me, and made me think of solutions faster, just as Zed said it would.

Happy typing!