Just as an aside this { code }, was typed without any conscious thought. As an average touch typist (about 60 WPM), I didn't have any difficulty on my MacBook Pro entering curly paren while keeping my fingers on the home row.

At least once a week I thank my teenage self for taking Grade 7 and 8 typing course (on ancient Manual typewriters - not even electric. The CBM 8032 was _just_ entering our world, and 100 Mile House had never bothered to upgrade to electric typewriters. I expect there is some meta-story regarding how you can teach people to do things without spending a lot of money)

Okay, as he says, nzmsv was half kidding. But really, this kind of attitude just touches a nerve with me. I work in corporate IT and in most places I've been, I'm seen as weird because of how fast I type.

I mean is it so unusual to actually to have facility with the tools of your trade?

Seriously, the curly brace doesn't even require you to move your hand from the home position. Anyone should be able to do that, unless you have problems with your pinky finger.

This reply is degenerating into a rant, so I apologize, but so many times I've been tagged as "the fast one", with the implication being that I'm not thorough. Guess what? Speed means more iterations, means I'm doing more in less time. And it doesn't preclude "thinking things through" either.

</rant>...back to your regularly scheduled, pre-new year's eve reading.

EDIT: Oh, and I hate the mouse.

>It's how well they think, which is mostly inversely related to WPM.

That's an...interesting claim. Why do you think typing ability is negatively correlated with intelligence?

Not so much typing ability as actual typing output. And this was supposed to be only half-serious :)

What I meant was that it's better to spend some time solving the problem in your head, rather than bang out line after line of bad code. So, in essence, the typing speed is not the bottleneck of coding productivity.

Of course, a proper study on this would be a better argument than just me making stuff up.

I, for one, can type almost 80wpm and am dumb as a rock. I can never solve logic puzzles, and struggle with debugging when writing one-page scripts in Python.

Upvoted, for making me chuckle.

But I'm pretty sure that typing speed and programming ability are not-correlated, most definitely not inversely related.

"Correlation does not equal causation"

Also, I really should learn to type better. This though got me googling. I found some discussion on the topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=952745 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510087

Also, I seem to remember someone posting a webapp typing tutor. Does anyone remember the name?