Likewise. It's my belief the expressiveness of their thought in flow was the magic.

that's not really on the same subject, touch typing. I know extremely fast hunt-and-peckers who use emacs with perfect facility.

Hmm, I've never seen someone who would be fast at typing yet not being able to touch type.

You guys have to define “fast”. After all, speed is relative. :)

fast: you know it when you see it.

I could hit triple digits WPM without knowing how to touch type. I just learned adhoc how to type very fast from gaming as a teenager. I haven since learned how to touch type (and moved to a split keyboard with Colemak-DH) and I type at a pretty similar WPM, it's just more comfortable.

Anecdata, for sure, but only a few of the best programmers I ever knew were touch typists. In another comment here I related the story of someone who was productive yet painful to watch. His typing speed had no bearing on the fact that he was the nearly always the most reliable and productive developer on his team.

He was a physics PhD who learned to code in FORTRAN in the 1970's, so he was definitely of another time.