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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Are you really any faster on average? Sure I can type 60 wpm (I haven't measured, but this is a reasonable speed for anyone to obtain with a little practice, maybe I'm only 40, or I might even get to 100), but that is in typing situations where I'm not having to think. If your job is to enter some document into a word processor (a human OCR), or transcribe a recording (human speech to text) then typing speed is your limit. However for most of us the limit is thinking. I can type one sentence fast, but then I need to stop to think what the next sentence will say and so my time goes down. When writing code I need even more time to think and thus my total speed is lower. My fingers can still move at 60wpm though.

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Back when I worked at an office my coworker commented to me that he could always tell when I was coding vs corresponding.

When corresponding, I type at around 120 wpm. When coding, it's got to be closer to 5 or 10. But I really like this idea that it would be useful to push that number lower (while still focusing on the task at hand).

Thing is, I got into this field because I really enjoy interacting with computers via keyboard. It's super satisfying to punch some buttons and make things happen. This is what I love about vim: right off the bat, a single button press feels like it does a lot. Then you punch a whole bunch of buttons to make a new button make something happen. Nevermind that it doesn't achieve product goals. I'm here for the button pressing, and for the creating of new buttons to be pressed.

I don't know why people are arguing with you. Clearly the question here is whether you think, then type, or type while you think.

I can type at >100 WPM (just tested). I recently had to write a 3-page document for work, the summary of weeks of research and interviewing. It wound up 1959 words (just checked). I wrote it over the course of one 8 hour day, after having procrastinated on it for the previous 2 days.

I came home at the end of that day exhausted because I felt like I finally did weeks of work in one day.

But, this 8 hour day had 2 hours of meetings and 1 hour for lunch. Say another 1 hour for random slacking. So pure concentrated writing was 4 hours or 240 minutes, which winds up to about 8 words per minute. That's it!

And I would consider this fairly fast, and again I'm not including the 2 days where I tried to write the doc at various times but failed to get started. SOMETHING was spinning in my brain in the background getting the ideas clarity.

I've never measured my thinking speed before. This measurement is intriguing. I feel that speed of thinking will be inversely proportional to the quality of content we write. Also, even if I can think fast and write quickly, I might have to go back and make amendments which can reduce my average thinking speed.

Linguists have noted that while some people talk faster than others - and some languages/cultures speak faster than others. However this is only a measure of word count, where people talk faster they are not actually saying more, they are just using more words to say it. (note that I could have eliminated "just" in the above sentence - to my ear it seems needed, but the sentence doesn't change meaning without it)

Human thought speed seems to be a reflection on how fast you need to think for normal conversations. Thus orders like "run" or "jump" are likely to be fast as if you need to tell someone to escape a lion speed is important. While if you are planning a hunt you are allowed a lot more time to get details right. Engineering often is a very slow activity as you need to think about a lot of details but you have time. Typing a message like this I want to be fast enough to follow my thought speed which is much faster (I won't claim to type this fast, but I get close and can believe with more practice I would be this fast)

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