OK, I do see that it will never be a bad thing to be a fast typer. However, spend a year learning to type faster or spend a year learning more math, logic and advanced progamming concepts ?
And 60wpm isn't that much. My impression is that some young people write that on their smartphone ;) (though definately you couldn't call that high accuracy)
That's just your assumption. I'd say typing is probably the sill that's easiest to optimize. Even if you just type 10% of your time, cutting it down by half is a significant improvement. Also, proper typing will boost your confidence and free your mind for more relevant things.
To draw parallels with Jiro: Cooks learn how to properly use a knife before they're even allowed to cook. They do so by exercising preperation over and over.
Muphry's law strikes again :)
I wouldn't necessarily recommend spending a year learning to type, but I would definitely recommend writing documentation as a process that will improve your code. Writing proper specifications, proposals, documentation, etc highlights problems amazingly well. I would argue that is what makes you a better coder, more than actually writing code, because explaining how your code works is the best way to see how your code could be improved.
More importantly, when I intentionally slowed my typing my coding improved dramatically. I went from short bursts of thinking followed by short bursts of typing, to continuous thinking. I started thinking about things that I had never considered before. Since I had time, I started to wonder if what I was typing was really the best way to solve my problem.
When I am coaching others, especially junior people with only a couple of years under their belts, I tell them to slow down. Like you, I am a huge proponent of learning to touch type properly. You should practice and refine your technique. However, I highly recommend typing slowly, steadily and calmly.
To say that you need fast typing to be a good programmer feels like a reversal of cause and effect to me. IMO People should be taught to love coding, then they'll naturally pick up touch typing by themselves.
Surely at least until you can type quickly and accurately, you're not going to get much out of learning to use a complex editor like emacs or vim, and indeed most command-line tools are going to be a chore to use.
As Jeff Atwood says, "When was the last time you saw a hunt-and-peck pianist?" [2]
[1] This is of course not an original thought. Here's Jeff Atwood saying the same thing: http://blog.codinghorror.com/we-are-typists-first-programmer...
[2] http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-keyboard-cult/ (I should mention that I don't agree with most of this post, but the line about pianists has always stuck with me.)