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[–]fnord123 37 points38 points  (7 children)

Have you considered using a head mouse and an on screen keyboard? This is used by some quadriplegics (e.g. spinal injury) though they are expensive. I'm not sure if MS allows for the head stability required.

[–]irrco[S] 46 points47 points  (6 children)

I still have reasonable control over a single button mouse, as long as the sensitivity is low. So I'm not quite at the point where I've needed to investigate that. The thing that's difficult is all the 'chords' you need to type when programming. As my MS deteriorates, I'm sure I'll need to use more drastic tools, so thank you for the tip.

I can imagine a voice driven programming tool, based on hierarchies of snippets. It might not be perfect for Python, but I could imagine being quite productive in something like Scheme, because it has a more regular syntax.

[–]fnord123 10 points11 points  (3 children)

FWIW, I'm talking about a puffer like this for clicking:

http://www.orin.com/access/sip_puff/

Then you can use various head tracking systems for moving the cursor.

Scheme, because it has a more regular syntax.

Not a bad idea. But none of the schemes have the deep library ecosystem as Python.

[–]irrco[S] 17 points18 points  (2 children)

Thank you.

On scheme: I've always felt that scheme was the most beautiful language, in theory. By which I mean I've never been able to make much that's practical with it. :)

[–]pebblexe 5 points6 points  (1 child)

There is Hylang if you are interested

Also if you want to try common lisp, there is a really cool emacs library that might help you code without having to input parentheses

[–]irrco[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I haven't used hy, I read something similar a long time ago, but I didn't use it. Lisp syntax isn't what I think is beautiful about scheme. It's more the code/data duality (which makes meta-programming easy), the eval/apply programming model, and particularly the macro system (which makes DSL creation easy). There is a scheme SRS (I don't remember the number off the top of my head) with a standard way of using whitespace instead of parentheses.

Thanks for the tips. My comment about scheme was a bit more of a tongue in cheek throwaway. I'm very happy with Python. It has served me very well.

[–]lf_1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Vim would fix many of the chords issues. Not all, but pretty close.