To balance the views, Mirabai, the person who started this project, does live transcription in vim and uses it for editing the notes as well. Ted, one of the lead developers, uses steno daily for programming. Emily, another user and plugin developer, has developed dictionaries to help with symbolic input and modifiers (e.g. ctrl+shift+x). There are plugins for changing case (camel, lower, snake etc.)
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's just not worth learning steno if you mainly do programming. It will be complicated, require complicated chords, require you to constantly add new words and remember what you saved them as, simple chords (short cuts) like C^n turn into complicated ones. It's just not that optimized for programming.
> it's just not worth learning steno if you mainly do programming
I think this will be better answered by someone who has crossed that bridge than you simply jumping to that conclusion with no experience or data to back up your claim.
CamelCase is built in to Plover! [1] symbols work too - they might have less intuitive memorisation, but you don't use that many anyway (unless you're in APL...but that doesn't work with normal keyboards either).
You can set up Vim-like navigation e.t.c. too (e.g. [2]), for moving about in code. I haven't tried it.
I think however that the benefits of coding with Plover aren't really great enough to justify the huge struggle it would be to get proficient with it.
Switching modes requires an extra chord. Movement in your editor now takes chords with a bunch of keys instead of 2. Steno is really flexible, but when you try to shoehorn it into situations where it's not good at the average chords per character typed.
In addition to that, I’d wager few people have long bouts of thinking code faster than they can type it. The act of typing is usually the easiest part of the whole process.