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dave4420

I can’t touch type. I spend more time thinking than I do typing. (Plus, I am usually also thinking while I type.)

Why do you say it is difficult to imagine being productive without this skill?

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When you do know what you want to type (after some thinking), do you really want your typing to slow you down?

It is rarely going to be a significant factor for anything more creative than copy typing.

Not really.

But I am still productive enough without being able to touch type.

And it’s not at all obvious to me that touch typing is the most important thing I could learn. Improving my knowledge of CSS and learning Elixir feel like they would do more to make me more productive at work. Maybe even memorising advanced Typescript type hackery.

Touch typing isn't all that hard to learn though. So why not try to learn it?

It would take a time investment I’m not particularly interested in making, and I don’t think it would make me noticeably better at my job.

Why do you think being able to type faster is a better win than being able to type better code, or being able to more quickly decide what to type?

Tech is always changing but your qwerty keyboard will never change.

Factually untrue.

My keyboard changes somewhat every time I buy a new laptop or have to sit down in front of someone else's machine for a while, eg a pool machine at uni. Especially the UK/US thing. Or use my phone and its various virtual keyboards. My daughter has just acquired one of the older MacBooks with a soft/programmable bar at the top. That changes dynamically. Would have broken my use of one of the few keys I do 'touch' type with muscle memory: ESC for vi, so I skipped that round of Macs.

Please don't make careless absolute or other very strong (wrong) statements if you want to have useful conversations without infuriating those who are careful with words.

Even if that was true… how much more productive do you think learning to touch type would make me? And why?

are you under the impression that learning to touch type is somehow going to make you worse at typing better code, or somehow hinder your ability to quickly decide what to type?

what a weird career limiting decision to make.

I'm in a weird halfway space when it comes to touch typing - I can't intentionally touch type, but I sometimes catch myself doing it unintentionally out of muscle memory. There is no significant change in my productivity between when I do or don't touch type, because I'm in the same boat as the gentleman above: I'm spending more time thinking about, designing and navigating code to build a mental map of the changes I need to make and its effects than I am doing the actual code changes, and I often find that means I only need to make those changes once.

It’s the opportunity cost. Why would I learn to touch type when I can instead learn something with a greater payoff?

You could, but we're here on a Sunday afternoon arguing about this when you could be learning about something with a greater payoff. If you were optimizing for that, you'd be somewhere else. In the time you took on this thread, you could have learned home row and done a touch typing lesson. Instead, it seems like you've made the decision not to learn it and are now just casting about for justifications why you're right not to. Which is entirely up to you, it doesn't affect me if you do or don't learn it, but at least be honest with yourself that you just don't want to because you're afraid or something instead of pretending that you're off learning about new programming techniques in place of learning to touch type, when you clearly aren't.

Of course not, I don’t devote my whole life to furthering my career, that would be crazy.

Touch typing is not "being able to type faster", it is "being able to type without looking at the keyboard".

It is useful, because you can focus more on the code on the screen, and/or reference material, than you could if you needed to be looking at what your fingers are doing on the keyboard.

Have you tried programming in something other than notepad.exe?

Modern IDEs have auto complete so impressive, that you don't need to type much anyway. I type several symbols then stop to let the editor suggest the rest of the word. Can I touch type it myself? Yes. Do I want to? No. There wouldn't be much difference if I typed slower.

NB. When I say "modern IDEs" I mean anything since around Visual Assist, which sorted suggestions not alphabetically, but depending on context. I don't even mean copilot.

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