Today is one of those days when life intervened and I’m late in getting a post out. Life may be intervening tomorrow too so be warned. Today I saw an interesting post by Thorsten Ball that considers the argument that doing things to increase your typing speed or skills is a waste of time. The argument that it’s a waste of time says that as developers we spend a minuscule amount of time typing in code. That typing is not a bottleneck in our workflow.
That’s a beguiling argument especially if you’re not a good typist. What does Steve Yegge know anyway? As Ball points out, we may not spend a lot of time typing code but we do spend a lot of time typing other things: reports, emails, commits, and so on. He concludes that it all boils down to a matter of effort: if it’s an effort for you to type, it will adversely affect your work.
You can check out his post for the details of his argument but, really, we all know that we’re better off and can do a better job if our typing doesn’t get in the way.