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Comment by beefield | Hacker News Reader

> The bottleneck is rarely how fast you can type or edit the code; it's how fast you can reason about the code.

That's the reason why I have been not learning to touch type for the last decade or so. I just have this strong feeling that it's my brain, not my fingers that is the bottleneck. At the same time, I somehow acknowledge that being able to touch type could in some still undefined way to me increase my productivity.

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It looked naively obvious to me in the 9th grade of high school that I would crank out code faster if I could touch type. That and write messages faster on dial-up bulletin boards, and crank out essay homework faster also. I signed up for a keyboarding course. After one day though, I thought, WTF am I doing in this mindless class full of ditzes? I could learn this on my own. I promptly dropped out, switching to some other course. Sticking with my initiative to learn to type, I found a book of fprogressive typing exercises: a guide consisting of a sequence of rows: type this row, then go onto this one, ... instead of just typing a row, like the book required, I filled the screen with each exercise, and then some. The book, which I must have found in the public library, started with exercises using just asdf, and jkl; and so forth, adding more areas of the keyboard. I forced myself to look only at the screen, and not the fingers. Several days later, I had gone through the entire book and, whoa, I could type. I wasn't a great typist by any means, but I was "boostrapped". All my regular typing was now done with all fingers, without looking and thus all my regular computer activities now served as typing exercises, making me faster and more accurate.

Touch typing will increase your productivity because you will get your HN comments done in 10% of the time, leaving time for thinking about code. :)

Development isn't just coding. It's writing documentation (requirements, high level design, detailed design, reference manuals, ...), commit comments, bug reports, e-mails, status reports, ...

Poor keyboarding skills will definitely hold you back.

In order to reason about code, one thing you can do is write. Not write code, but prose about the subject matter. Writing is a thinking tool, and if you have good typing skills, the words pour out a lot faster, at times almost as fast as you can think.

I would recommend learning to touch type. The benefits are many. I can look at the screen or something else while typing. Typing requires essentially no conscious attention. I can just think more easily while typing.

I also got a job from it once, when the company boss saw me coding away and was impressed by my typing speed! Silly I know, but it did happen :)

Really doesn't take that long to learn, a few weeks or months of a small amount of daily practice would get you to enough proficiency to use it for real. I used Mavis Beacon I think, but that was a long time ago.

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