I’m friends with programmers who can’t touch type.
If by “touch type” you mean the “home row” sort of technique that’s taught in typing classes, then I have yet to see a single convincing argument for why I should bother to learn this. (I’m a programmer.) I see it often taken for granted that this sort of “touch typing” is simply a must for coders, but whenever I ask why that’s so, the reasons I’ve seen given do not make the slightest bit of sense.
Now, if you simply mean “typing without having to look at the keyboard”, well, sure. I can do that. Didn’t have to learn any specific “technique” for it, though.
P.S.:
50 to 80 words per minute is around the average for professional typists, and should be what most people strive for if they type for a living.
I just took an online typing test. On my MacBook Pro, while lying on the couch, in a not-entirely-comfortable typing position, my typing speed is 73 wpm.
Specific “touch typing” techniques are completely unnecessary. Please let’s let this absurd myth die.
Independently, a month or two ago I observed to a friend how funny it was that there used to be this fad around touch-typing, where even in tv shows they would show that a person was a computer hacker because of the speed they could type while looking at the screen, and yet now I and everyone I know touch-types, and we never had to take any lessons for it—I have that super-cool ability that people thought you had to train for. I just took the typing test you linked, on sentences, got 85 wpm, sitting in a comfortable typing position, not looking at the keyboard.
I have not read OP yet, but indeed my current epistemic state is that there’s nothing further to train here, everyone involved in tech just learns it naturally and does it pretty well.
Why is fast typing considered a necessary skill for programmers in the first place? For secretaries or writers it seems to make a difference, but how much time would be delayed if a programmer was only able to type, say, 30 words per minute? It seems to me that if you have to pause to think, typing speed was never a bottleneck anyway.
I agree with this criticism and have made it myself before. However, I do think there’s something to it when it comes to especially slow typing (arbitrarily, ⇐ 35 WPM). At least for me, sometimes I need to “clear out my mental buffer” by actually writing out the code I’ve thought about before I can think about the next thing. When I’m in this position, being able to type relatively quickly seems to helps me stay in the flow and get to the next thought faster.
Also, frankly, sometimes you just need to churn out 10s of lines of code that are somewhat mindless (yes, DRY, but I still think some situations require this) and while doing them fast doesn’t save you that much time overall, it certainly can help with maintaining sanity.
Related to that, I think the big problem with hunt and peck typing is that it isn’t just slower, it also takes your attention off the flow of the code by forcing you to focus on the characters you’re typing.
ETA: all that said, I definitely agree with Said that it’s not necessary to learn typing in a formal setting and definitely would not encourage colleges to teach it. I actually did have a computer class in elementary school that taught touch typing but still got much faster mostly by using AIM in middle school.
Here is a guy arguing that programmers should type fast so that they can have long written discussions. Also, comments and documentation. (And blog posts. He is famous for long blog posts. But this one is only 3500 words)
If you have a fixed amount of documentation you have to create, then doubling your typing speed, say from 30 to 60wpm will cut in half the amount of time to write it. No matter how much faster become beyond that, you won’t be able to save the other half of the time. Doubling again to 120 will save only half as much time as the first doubling saved. However, you could spend your typing speed in other ways. You could produce twice as many drafts of the documentation.
I’ve heard the alternate explanation that having to stare at the keyboard is bad for your neck/spine because of the downward angle in your head position, and touch typing allows you to avoid that. Which is especially important for programmers apparently because they work in front of a computer screen all the time.
Given that we have a technique taboo, it seems nobody really studied this question scientifically. I ask the question years ago on Skeptics.SE and it seems to be one of the highest upvoted questions on the side despite being essentially unanswered.
This might make for a good amateur science project. All you have to do is collect a bunch of programmers together and get them to answer a standardized set of tests and then measure their typing speed. Scatterplot the results. Admittedly it would measure correlation, not causation, but it’d be a start.
You could do even better by measuring the typing speed of an introductory computer science class and then compare it to the students’ grades at the end of the quarter.
It seems to me that if you have to pause to think, typing speed was never a bottleneck anyway.
Seconding this question, which is, indeed, one of the things that “technique touch typing” advocates have never been able to answer to my satisfaction.
I intended to refer only to typing quickly without looking at the keyboard. I did not intend to imply the superiority of specific traditional typing techniques beyond how well they achieve this.
Note again that I type more than fast enough for my profession, without any specific technique at all—just naturally developed typing skills, picked up over years of using computers. This directly undermines the “touch typing” example, which is one of the examples you give to support your point.
What you say here… is not actually a counterexample?
You can touchtype, you said, even if you’re not using a specific technique. Typing fast enough for your job is part of what qualifies you for it. It’s something that came from years of experience with computers, professionally or no.
Just because someone can develop the skill naturally over time, though, doesn’t mean that they certainly will. They might compensate for the wasted time with other strengths. That experience will accrue to improvement over time doesn’t preclude someone getting massive gains from introducing an explicit technique or focused practice earlier.
If by “touch type” you mean the “home row” sort of technique that’s taught in typing classes, then I have yet to see a single convincing argument for why I should bother to learn this. (I’m a programmer.) I see it often taken for granted that this sort of “touch typing” is simply a must for coders, but whenever I ask why that’s so, the reasons I’ve seen given do not make the slightest bit of sense.
Now, if you simply mean “typing without having to look at the keyboard”, well, sure. I can do that. Didn’t have to learn any specific “technique” for it, though.
P.S.:
—from https://elearningindustry.com/why-average-typing-speed-is-important
I just took an online typing test. On my MacBook Pro, while lying on the couch, in a not-entirely-comfortable typing position, my typing speed is 73 wpm.
Specific “touch typing” techniques are completely unnecessary. Please let’s let this absurd myth die.
Independently, a month or two ago I observed to a friend how funny it was that there used to be this fad around touch-typing, where even in tv shows they would show that a person was a computer hacker because of the speed they could type while looking at the screen, and yet now I and everyone I know touch-types, and we never had to take any lessons for it—I have that super-cool ability that people thought you had to train for. I just took the typing test you linked, on sentences, got 85 wpm, sitting in a comfortable typing position, not looking at the keyboard.
I have not read OP yet, but indeed my current epistemic state is that there’s nothing further to train here, everyone involved in tech just learns it naturally and does it pretty well.
Why is fast typing considered a necessary skill for programmers in the first place? For secretaries or writers it seems to make a difference, but how much time would be delayed if a programmer was only able to type, say, 30 words per minute? It seems to me that if you have to pause to think, typing speed was never a bottleneck anyway.
I agree with this criticism and have made it myself before. However, I do think there’s something to it when it comes to especially slow typing (arbitrarily, ⇐ 35 WPM). At least for me, sometimes I need to “clear out my mental buffer” by actually writing out the code I’ve thought about before I can think about the next thing. When I’m in this position, being able to type relatively quickly seems to helps me stay in the flow and get to the next thought faster.
Also, frankly, sometimes you just need to churn out 10s of lines of code that are somewhat mindless (yes, DRY, but I still think some situations require this) and while doing them fast doesn’t save you that much time overall, it certainly can help with maintaining sanity.
Related to that, I think the big problem with hunt and peck typing is that it isn’t just slower, it also takes your attention off the flow of the code by forcing you to focus on the characters you’re typing.
ETA: all that said, I definitely agree with Said that it’s not necessary to learn typing in a formal setting and definitely would not encourage colleges to teach it. I actually did have a computer class in elementary school that taught touch typing but still got much faster mostly by using AIM in middle school.
Here is a guy arguing that programmers should type fast so that they can have long written discussions. Also, comments and documentation. (And blog posts. He is famous for long blog posts. But this one is only 3500 words)
If you have a fixed amount of documentation you have to create, then doubling your typing speed, say from 30 to 60wpm will cut in half the amount of time to write it. No matter how much faster become beyond that, you won’t be able to save the other half of the time. Doubling again to 120 will save only half as much time as the first doubling saved. However, you could spend your typing speed in other ways. You could produce twice as many drafts of the documentation.
I’ve heard the alternate explanation that having to stare at the keyboard is bad for your neck/spine because of the downward angle in your head position, and touch typing allows you to avoid that. Which is especially important for programmers apparently because they work in front of a computer screen all the time.
Given that we have a technique taboo, it seems nobody really studied this question scientifically. I ask the question years ago on Skeptics.SE and it seems to be one of the highest upvoted questions on the side despite being essentially unanswered.
This might make for a good amateur science project. All you have to do is collect a bunch of programmers together and get them to answer a standardized set of tests and then measure their typing speed. Scatterplot the results. Admittedly it would measure correlation, not causation, but it’d be a start.
You could do even better by measuring the typing speed of an introductory computer science class and then compare it to the students’ grades at the end of the quarter.
If there’s a strong correlation that would be very valuable information for anybody that hires programmers.
Seconding this question, which is, indeed, one of the things that “technique touch typing” advocates have never been able to answer to my satisfaction.
This is a good, complicated question. It deserves its own post.
I intended to refer only to typing quickly without looking at the keyboard. I did not intend to imply the superiority of specific traditional typing techniques beyond how well they achieve this.
Note again that I type more than fast enough for my profession, without any specific technique at all—just naturally developed typing skills, picked up over years of using computers. This directly undermines the “touch typing” example, which is one of the examples you give to support your point.
What you say here… is not actually a counterexample?
You can touchtype, you said, even if you’re not using a specific technique. Typing fast enough for your job is part of what qualifies you for it. It’s something that came from years of experience with computers, professionally or no.
Just because someone can develop the skill naturally over time, though, doesn’t mean that they certainly will. They might compensate for the wasted time with other strengths. That experience will accrue to improvement over time doesn’t preclude someone getting massive gains from introducing an explicit technique or focused practice earlier.
:D If I could write the right 50-80 words of code per minute my career would be very happy about it.