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7

CodingHorror writes:

So if you want to become a great programmer, start by becoming a great typist. [...] When you're a fast, efficient typist, you spend less time between thinking that thought and expressing it in code. [...] I believe in practicing the fundamentals, and typing skills are as fundamental as it gets for programmers.

ASNA writes:

Having spent tons of classroom time with lots of students for the last 14 years or so, one of my general observations is that many programmers aren’t as good at typing as they should be. [...] I’ll get arguments here, but for my money, better typists make better programmers!

Dodgy Coder writes:

Learning to touch type is a quick and effective way to give your productivity a boost as a programmer.

Is there evidence that programmers that learn to type faster will tend to be better programmers? Do those programmers perform better on the job that employers pay programmers to do?

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10  
It is a good idea not to write faster than you think. This is especially true when programming, or you will just spend more time debugging than writing code. This really belongs on the programming SE. – Dikran Marsupial Aug 27 '14 at 13:24
1  
How do you define "better"? Also, I generally only type a few letters before Visual Studio auto completes what I was going to type – msmucker0527 Aug 27 '14 at 18:08
1  
@msmucker0527 - There are various proposed metrics in the academic literature. I don't care for the particular metric that's used for studying it. – Christian Aug 27 '14 at 18:53
1  
@Christian - are you limiting the claim to typing the code, or typing documentation (and emails, and other natural language communication, which arguably can easily constitute 10-100x times the typing a typical software developer does in his job compared to typing pure code)? – user5341 Sep 3 '14 at 16:03
1  
@DikranMarsupial - there's already 2 of them on Programmers, neither offering any reliable evidence: programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/95355/… and programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/26243/… – user5341 Sep 3 '14 at 16:37
up vote 8 down vote

While there is a certain level of typing efficiency that is required to actually get work done, many would say that thinking about proper design is much more important, especially in more concise languages. A rather popular talk on the subject is Rich Hickey's "Hammock Driven Design" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc) in this talk he advocates a method of design that focuses on thinking about the problem before actually writing the code. He mentions that the best work he has ever done has been after he thought about the problem for months (years?) before implementation. The results are quite evident, his work on Clojure and Datomic are masterpieces of design.

Another interesting example is William Byrd and Daniel Friedman's talks (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/chomsky-hierarchy) I was surprised to find that Friedman's typing style is closer to "hunt-and-peck" than normal touch typing, but yet he has been a programmer for years, and has written some very impressive programming languages.

So from these examples I would conclude that "fast typing" is not required to be a decent (or even excellent) programmer. Proper design is more important than the implementation of a solution.

But to begin a study that's even close to answering this question, one would need to ask "how do we define 'fast' and 'better'".

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Some of the information contained in this post requires additional references. Please edit to add citations to reliable sources that support the assertions made here. Unsourced material may be disputed or deleted.
1  
Conversely, here is an example where typing speed was crucial. – ChrisW Aug 27 '14 at 21:08
4  
@ChrisW - There's nothing there which actually implies his typing speed was critical, aside from the reporter's word choice of "furiously". He could have been putting in 20 hour days at a keyboard, where even typing slowly your wrists will hurt by the end. – Bobson Aug 27 '14 at 21:32
7  
Linking to personal opinions is an appeal to authority, not a reference. You need better references. – Sklivvz♦ Aug 28 '14 at 4:32
3  
Also, programming productivity is a well studied subject, contrary to popular opinion. – Sklivvz♦ Aug 28 '14 at 4:34
1  
Not many programmers have the luxury of thinking about a problem for months... – Benjol Aug 28 '14 at 5:15

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