Is it possible to be a productive programmer with slow typing speed? Yes. I have met some.
But…can fast typing speed be an advantage for most people? Yes!
Like you said, once you come up with an idea it can be a huge advantage to be able to type out that idea quickly to try it out before your mind wanders.
But also, I use typing for so many others things: writing Slack messages and emails. Writing responses to bug tickets. Writing new tickets. Documentation. Search queries.
The faster I type, the faster I can do those things. Also, the more I’m incentivized to do it. It’s no big deal to file a big report for something I discovered along the way because I can type it up in 30 seconds. Someone else who’s slow at typing might not bother because it’d take too long.
Also m, while I agree typing speed is an advantage, there’s nothing stoping you from laying out the whole program on paper or with psudo code and then filling it in which can reduce the need to keep it all in your head
IMO trying to write everything out in psudo code first is way slower. You are writing things out twice and you are not able to run things quickly. You just have to hope you got things right on the first pass and cannot quickly adjust things when you don’t.
I prefer constant feedback from my editor, compiler and test framework to write things quickly and make sure I am not doing something that is fundamentally flawed. There is nothing worst than writing a whole program without running it only to run it and realise nothing is working how you thought it should.
Is it possible to be a productive programmer with slow typing speed? Yes. I have met some.
But…can fast typing speed be an advantage for most people? Yes!
Like you said, once you come up with an idea it can be a huge advantage to be able to type out that idea quickly to try it out before your mind wanders.
But also, I use typing for so many others things: writing Slack messages and emails. Writing responses to bug tickets. Writing new tickets. Documentation. Search queries.
The faster I type, the faster I can do those things. Also, the more I’m incentivized to do it. It’s no big deal to file a big report for something I discovered along the way because I can type it up in 30 seconds. Someone else who’s slow at typing might not bother because it’d take too long.
Also m, while I agree typing speed is an advantage, there’s nothing stoping you from laying out the whole program on paper or with psudo code and then filling it in which can reduce the need to keep it all in your head
IMO trying to write everything out in psudo code first is way slower. You are writing things out twice and you are not able to run things quickly. You just have to hope you got things right on the first pass and cannot quickly adjust things when you don’t.
I prefer constant feedback from my editor, compiler and test framework to write things quickly and make sure I am not doing something that is fundamentally flawed. There is nothing worst than writing a whole program without running it only to run it and realise nothing is working how you thought it should.