Typing fast is about latency, not throughput

&gt; It’s difficult to type and think at the same time, so any time spent writing is a pause in thoughts, which can derail the flow.<p>I&#x27;m a competitive typist. I&#x27;m also a programmer. The main positive that I see is that typing no longer requires thought. I think of the code I want to write and it&#x27;s transcripted onto the computer.<p>I would say that it&#x27;s more advantageous to type _accurately_ than quickly. Typing competitions generally require 100% accuracy, which gives me a great amount of belief that what I&#x27;m typing is correct, without having to look at it &#x2F; check it over and get side tracked from the code itself.

Not the core point of the article, but …<p>&gt; To be clear, at a steady state in a mature project, I get something like 125 lines of code into production per week.<p>I don’t think this is uncommon, but it’s wild to me that so many companies let their dev productivity degrade to this level. I work at a decent sized startup, 8 years old, fairly large codebase, and even junior devs who are pretty new to the company are averaging a couple hundred LOC&#x2F;week shipped to prod, while the most productive devs are averaging ~1K LOC&#x2F;week.<p>We spend plenty of time keeping the dev env fast, keeping CI (build, test and deploy) fast, minimizing risk even with minimal QA (strong test coverage, canary deploys with auto-rollback, strong alerting), and refactoring to reduce complexity. But even still, ~60% of overall dev time is spent on product stuff, and this other ~40% is SO worth it if it keeps devs ~10x as productive.<p>An environment where even strong devs only average ~125 LOC&#x2F;week is just so, so unproductive, it’s crazy to me that companies let this become the norm. Prior to my current company (which I would consider very high productivity), I worked at a place where the productivity was more inline with 125 LOC&#x2F;week (experienced, fully on-boarded devs were around 200 I’d guess), I can see how this happens, but it’s crazy to me that so many companies LET it happen.

To put it into networking terms, the brain-finger output is a leaky bucket. The brain fills the buffer, and the fingers commit at some interval. The buffer is fairly small, and overflows are simply forgotten. The buffer has both time-based and size-based eviction policies. The faster you can type, the less you might forget.

I guessed that this would be arguing something similar to the &quot;tests should be very fast&quot; argument. There, the point is that anything that causes you to context shift is bad. The feedback loop of code&#x2F;test&#x2F;break&#x2F;fix is everything.<p>But I think after reading that the argument was more akin to webpage load times. Sure, a few extra seconds isn&#x27;t measurably a lot, but there&#x27;s a feeling of responsiveness that matters to our psyche, even if according to wall time it&#x27;s not a big deal. This I find more plausible. I&#x27;ve seen code. I know how damn lazy we can be. People seem to be willing to spend hours of pain to avoid writing tiny helper structs, or writing helper methods, or giving functions&#x2F;variables names with multiple words.<p>Still, 80 wpm seems like a lot off hand. That&#x27;s coming up on regular speaking speed. I wonder if I could test the difference on myself to see if it bothered me; maybe add something that slows my typing rate to 80?

With far more people doing remote work now than pre-2020, IM is another way in which typing speed is very important for productivity, and this likely has a teamwide effect too --- if most of your team can type nearly at the speed of thought, then everyone waiting for the slowest member to share his thoughts on some discussion gets irritating rather quickly.<p>Yes, I know there are audio calls, but with IM it&#x27;s much easier to be doing more than one thing at once, and talking into each other isn&#x27;t a problem.

In my opinion, latency is a super important concept that got forgotten once we moved every application to web interfaces.<p>I remember the 90s and the 20s, when everything happened locally on the local hardware. It was quite easy to type fast, move the focus around in the various forms using tab and shift-tab, move from tabs and windows with ctrl&#x2F;alt-tab; and there was keyboard shortcuts for most things. I remember being able to execute complex operations between multiple applications using only my keyboard and without having to use any brain power between each step.<p>Now most things are moved to cloud applications and we interact with them with web browsers. Keyboard shortcuts are (mostly) gone, and each click or operation triggers a request on the other side of the world with a high HTTP latency, and that prevents the brain from chaining them for free.<p>I remember being able to do almost everything using my keyboard. Now good luck interacting with a web console without switching back and forth from keyboard to mouse for 50% of the steps.<p>I guess that&#x27;s also why many developers (including myself) still love the CLI environments.

The author is missing the point. If your editor doesn&#x27;t have abbreviations, snippets, completion, etc., you&#x27;re doing it wrong.<p>If you can type above ~80 WPM (which basically just means you can touch type), then using the proper tools your effective WPM is easily above 150 and thus totally irrelevant.<p>Or put in other words, once you can touch type, you are far better off improving your tools and workflows than practicing typing. In a competition you might train your legs, but in real life you get in a car.

Auto correction systems are a relevant external factor, in some typing contexts. For example, one (probably bad, but who&#x27;s to say??) habit I&#x27;ve picked up recently is to cheese [0] the Googling of things - saving a massive zero.point.bugger_all seconds per time - by fat-fingering my search queries in a rush, without bothering to spell words correctly. What did Samuel L Jackson say, exactly? - why, &quot;thta movei abotu bible speehc&quot;, of course - first result [1], done! None of this pesky &#x27;stopping to think about what order the letters go in&#x27; business!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.urbandictionary.com&#x2F;define.php?term=cheese%20strategy" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.urbandictionary.com&#x2F;define.php?term=cheese%20str...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=thta+movei+abotu+bible+speehc" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=thta+movei+abotu+bible+speeh...</a>

I completely agree with this. I&#x27;ve been working on my own 30 day challenge to boost my typing speed, and the reason is similar to what&#x27;s stated in this article: it&#x27;s about latency, it&#x27;s not the seconds saved.<p>It&#x27;s mentioned in the article, but I mostly think of it as: the faster one types, the shorter the iteration time. When you can type roughly as fast as you&#x27;d normally speak, it&#x27;s a totally different experience than t-y-p-i-n-g each word of a sentence.

Any latency in any system high enough to interrupt your thought process hurts. Unfortunately it&#x27;s one of those hard to market things that people don&#x27;t know they want, so it&#x27;s (rightfully?) never prioritised.<p>I wish we had better consumers.

Eh, I don&#x27;t know if I agree. For me the bottleneck is my brain. I spend far more time thinking than typing. Being able to type faster would only save me a small amount of time compared to being able to think faster.<p>I guess to steelman it, it&#x27;s like investing in a faster 3D printer so you can iterate on your CAD faster. There&#x27;s some value there I suppose.

When you say &quot;Doing X fast is about Y&quot; it means that Y is the key to doing X fast.<p>The headline here is misleading; it&#x27;s supposed to be &quot;The <i>Benefit of</i> Typing Fast is the reduced Latency, not the Throughput&quot;.<p>If you wanted high throughput, what you could do is type at 20 wpm, and do so continuously all day without taking a break: minute after minute, cranking out twenty new words.<p>Your daily throughput would be higher than that of many a 160 wpm typist who only wields that skill in short bursts throughout the day.<p>The benefit of typing fast is that in those moments when you need something banged up, you see the result faster: the latency from starting to type to completing the intended change is lower with faster typing.

I find the most beneficial thing about being able to touch type as a programmer is that you don&#x27;t need to concentrate on the task of typing. That way you don&#x27;t lose your train of thought so easily while working on something.

&gt; It’s difficult to type and think at the same time<p>I&#x27;m pretty good at typing, but not anything special, at around 90-95 words per minute. I type while thinking all the time, although usually the thinking is the slow part.<p>Other have mentioned speed and accuracy, but one thing that has been a huge advantage to me is being able to type confidently enough while not looking at the keyboard or screen (or only checking infrequently). It is pretty helpful to be able to have a conversation looking at the person while taking notes, rather than saying &quot;let me write that down&quot; every 5 seconds, interrupting the flow of the conversation.

This post and this comment section both feel to me like they’re from a parallel universe where no one knows that LOC isn’t a measure of quality but a <i>cost</i>. You want to keep it as <i>low</i> as possible while solving the problem at hand. As a matter of fact, you can often increase the quality of the product by removing code.<p>Typing fast won’t make you a better programmer. It will only encourage you to type before you think. It is amazing how much can be done with how little code if you give your brain a chance to actually process what you’re doing. I highly recommend it.

&gt; It’s difficult to type and think at the same time<p>Maybe for the author. I think best at the keyboard. As others have noted, once you reach the point where the typing is both quick and unconscious, words just kind of <i>happen</i>.<p>Obviously at a gross level one&#x27;s typing speed isn&#x27;t the bottleneck in coding; you need so little ASCII on screen vs. with prose. However, being able to get even &quot;bad&quot; out quickly can help you rough out an algorithm quickly. The ability to get the code onscreen at the speed of thought is very, very valuable.

I love it when there’s a blogpost I’ve been meaning to write for years, and someone else comes along and does a good job writing up the same point, and with better framing.

After I practiced and increased speed from 250 to 380 char&#x2F;s, the effect was that I started writing in IM larger messages and explaining things more thoroughly. This became much easier than earlier.<p>So I&#x27;d agree, that you may write down things quickly or write a lot more in a minute. For coding this means you easily write comments, for messages or articles means you can write a lot more in one moment, which means you write a lot more elaborately.

It’s why copilot is such a game changer. It can fill out chunks of code faster than any typer alive.<p>Latency is about one second.

Some very famous programmers I know are hunt and peckers.<p>(Lack of) Typing speed has not hindered their career.

Touch typing is something I should&#x27;ve invested in much earlier, can&#x27;t imagine how I ever coped without this ability. Another thing that really helped me is the &quot;Alternative finger positioning&quot; described here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;typingsoft.com&#x2F;typing.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;typingsoft.com&#x2F;typing.htm</a> It feel much more natural not having to bend your wrists. Is anyone else also doing this? Whenever people ask me how to learn touch typing I look for native Linux or macOS app that teach this technique, but I haven&#x27;t found any yet...

Back in the day I heard stories of how some of the better ACM ICPC world final participants turned out to be rather slow typers. But the idea was that they figured out what to do before they type, and their own clarity of thought allowed them to type correct code without having to backtrack. It helped that most of the time the solutions are pretty short.<p>I consider myself a pretty good problem solver of contest problems, but often I have to type code the same way people use pencil and paper to go through drafts, so I can&#x27;t relate that well.

Like any skill it&#x27;s about cultivating a set of &quot;hardwired co-processors&quot;.<p>The more skilled you are, the more of these tasks can be handled in parallel, for example typing and reading, thinking.<p>Or, for example, walking and chewing gum at the same time.<p>It&#x27;s like how a learner driver needs to focus on the task fully, while an experienced driver only seldom needs conscious thought to execute the process.<p>Or a pianist sight-reading and playing the notes, while also interpreting the piece on a higher level. It&#x27;s all about parallel processing

I agree that latency is important, the way in which you can type out things without spending extra time in delays can be a huge productivity boost,<p>One sort of analogy we can give is driving a car with good response time, even if the car is not having a good top speed, the acceleration we get when we push the pedal is enough to think we are going fast.<p>But throughput can also have a dominating factor, but its reliant on other areas, like typing out an already prepared article.<p>For operations that require thought, latency is important

I mean, maybe? The absolute largest obstacle any of these examples will have to overcome, though, is all of the amazing stuff that was done in the past. And all of the amazing things that are done today with long feedback loops.<p>Like, I get it. This seems to be a low hanging fruit that you should consider. But it seems somewhat likely that you will draw the line below stenography. We don&#x27;t even teach shorthand to people anymore, and that would fall into all of these arguments, as well.

My limiting factor is _command_ throughput in my brain; coming up with the words I want and how to spell them massively slows me down. I really wish I could figure out how to go faster (~80 WPM) because I&#x27;m essentially limited by the speed my internal narrator dictates to me, which is close to realtime speaking speed. This is less of a problem while coding, but I still think it&#x27;s quite relevant.

Typing speed is not a bottleneck, staying in the zone is.<p>Training yourself to do less effort &#x2F; having more fun while writing code is a good way to stay in the zone longer.<p>But it is not enough in itself, tooling (fast compiler especially) can break or improve the flow substantially.<p>I’d say that typing speed should only be seen as an optimisation target once the tooling is really smooth.

I type no more 25 wpm with at least a 10% error rate, but I don’t have to think about it at all. But I have never been slowed down by typing latency. I spend half my day researching and half my day spacing out and the remaining 2&#x2F;3 of the day in meetings and still get more done — with fewer lines of code — than the average developer.

I am a touch typist since 30 years. I don&#x27;t feel like I am thinking while I am typing. Typing happens automatically. Much like it works for musicians with sufficient practice. After a certain point, things become automatic, and you no longer consciously think about each and every key you press.

Well, easy test is to use high-latency device. Only prints one letter every 100 ms. You will still spend negligible time typing to thinking. Will you be worse programmer? I think so. Input device is for transmitting thoughts. Should be seamless, blend to background. If ever becomes foreground, you lose flow state.

What’s the best modern IDE and editor which offers the lowest latency?<p>I haven’t come across anything faster than sublime text so far.

It&#x27;s about what you type, not how fast you type it. &#x2F;typed at 113 wpm

Standard qwerty people, how do you get around the arrow keys? It seems to be the only thing that reliably throws me off-cadence, when I have to reach to the bottom right to move around in code.

I wish my productivity was bound by my typing speed and not my thinking

And then there is actual keyboard latency as well:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;keyboard-latency&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;keyboard-latency&#x2F;</a>

On the other hand, I would have a very difficult time dictating what I want to write, because... well I almost feel like I speak <i>too</i> fast! My voice goes faster than my thoughts.

Why don&#x27;t the schools, regular ones, teach proper ten finger touch typing? But then, will it still be a common vital skill in let&#x27;s say 20 years? (I think yes)

the preceding knowledge acquisition before starting programming takes the overwhelming majority of typing. this includes web searches, asking questions in forums, IRC,. ...

Is this the right place (&#x2F;s) for me to complain about a regression in iOS 17.1 and 17.2 (beta) where typing too fast will randomly switch to other apps? [1]<p>It’s such a frustrating experience that I’ve noticed my communication has gone down noticeably in the past two weeks.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;iOSBeta&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1774w2h&#x2F;ios_171_db3_typing_on_the_keyboard_randomly&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;iOSBeta&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1774w2h&#x2F;ios_171_db...</a>

Sometimes calmly thinking about what you want to type next is 1&#x2F;2 the joy...

Does CTRL-TAB (or whatever is used for auto-complete) count as a word?

&gt; Someone writing code can think of how to structure the code<p>Then, just think about it, and not type it out like a caveman prematurely.<p>Also, no one on Earth has ever written continuously for 5 seconds outside of typing competitions. You don’t have 5 seconds of coherent text buffer available in your mind even for natural text, let alone codes. So that +3 seconds is complete nonsense.

Sorry