81 here. And i thought, that i’m godlike. So you’re more godlike, than i am 
I wonder how many people who argue here that the ability to type quickly is not an important requirement have also argued that Ruby’s ability to type less characters characters IS important.
My guess is actually quite a few, but none that would admit it.
Typing well may be damn important but coding is by no means just typing
I’m a firm believer that actually writing your code is the least time portion of the software development process.
Is 60WPM bad?
- cries *
Range from 75-88 with 1 mistake (poor spelling).
I’m not really sure your analogy holds up. Getting up and moving to a room takes longer and changes the context more. A delay of a few seconds does little.
I’m dubious as to whether better typing makes you a better coder, or that there is merely a correlation between the two. After all, it isn’t surprising that someone who is a good coder has spent a lot of time typing and thus developed good typing skills. It doesn’t necessarily follow that going out and learning to type properly will make you much of a better coder.
I’m by no means a touch-typist. But I get along. And I only scored 45 WPM…
That said, typing speed is of course a factor.
But don’t type the same over and over. Use an editor with snippet and template-support. Use code-completion.
Personally that means TextMate for me when doing markup and VS2008 w/Resharper for those .Net moments.
I agree that typing is extremely important for a programmer, and a skill worthy of practice.
But are we programmers secondarily to typists? I don’t think you made a good case for that, and to be honest, I don’t think one is possible. I’m open minded though. =)
I’m a self-taught two-finger typist… been doing it that way for 30 years so it’s pretty ingrained.
I got only 31 wpm, with 0 errors.
I admit I have never felt hampered by typing speed while coding. Where it hurts is in email and documentation, and programmers type a lot more emails than code.
75 wpm, which is good enough considering English isn’t my native language.
If you think more, you type less. Just in case you think this is an excuse, I just got 95wpm.
Broken clocks are right twice a day…
(sorry for the pedantry) ;o)
A few years ago I started out in the IT industry where most people do: tech support. It was for a small ISP and before the new phone system came in we would have to come into the office, listen to a voicemail and type in a support ticket from it. There is no better way to learn than to try to type with someone as they speak and you’ll get quite fast in a short amount of time.
I love my Das Keyboard!
People are always stunned to see it, and fearful too. I encourage them to give it a try and tell them they’ll surprise themselves and sure enough most people do pleasantly discover they know the keyboard better than they thought.
It really surprises me when I find IT types who can’t type. I never had any lessons or went to any real effort but just became a very fast typist through simply doing it every day for 24 years now!
I’ve been doing software for over 10 years and still cannot touch-type. The most used key is the backspace.
If dyslexia exists then so does the dis-ability for typing?
Speed matters. Yes, too slow and your buggered, too fast and your buggered. What about velocity? Momentum?
Can you just stop pontificating and just say that typing faster with more accuracy is preferable than not and leave it at that.
But you’re right, there are no excuses; there are explanations and reasons.
That’s why vi was the editor of the gods. (Emacs also, as much as it pains me to say that, but still better than the current IDE crap.) You didn’t have to break your thought to find the mouse, highlight something, and then go back to the keyboard. You just thought I need to delete these three lines and poof they were gone.
Hold down CTRL + SHIFT press down 3 times press delete or backspace, use home if necessary.
30 wpm several reason for that, but who cares anyway. If you need to type anything your not using your IDE code completion, code completion. Ppl bashing the keyboard are not using a IDE or are polluting the codebase with boilerplate code. …and insulting your own intelligence. (excluding Perl programmers I suppose)
Regardless of getting 30wpm in a IDE I can make code appear as fast as my eyes can track it.
I think you are wrong. What you are basically saying is: An artist, how can’t paint a wall very fast, will never produce nice paintings. How can this be right? Of course if the artist is exceptionally slow, he will never finish his painting - but ultimately mechanical speed is of less matter…
Actually, a broken clock is right twice a day !
Once from 0 to 12am
Once from 12 to 0pm
Anyone out there who can not type over 80wpm that is trying to justify that you don’t need to type fast would have a completely different opinion if they could type up to speed. My suggestion, just learn to type, it is not that difficult, and then you will learn to value it.
this is the program I use: http://klavaro.sourceforge.net/en/
Why, why can’t we finally get rid of that stupid useless obstructive shift between the key rows? It was introduced to allow levers to fit one next to another beneath the keyboard. We don’t have those levers for half a century already! It absolutely doesn’t help for fast typing. Let’s get rid of it and make keyboards straight and square. It’ll be much easier for typing. It can even be done very smoothly, w/o forcing everybody to switch to a new standard in one night: let’s make keyboards with the rows shifting towards the right locating one millimeter per three or five years. In just two decades we’ll have an ideal keyboard. (I mean physically, of course the QWERTY layout is one of the stupidiest things we use.)
Your speed was: 4538wpm.
use programmer’s favorite: copy-paste
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