I have the same problem with entering a room and forgetting why I entered it. I even forget that I came in there for a reason–I just see something else in the room to do and I do that instead. I’ve tried to learn touch-typing, too, but mid-keystroke I forget I’m learning to type and change the channel. Let’s go ride bikes!
Ah, but there ARE analog 24 hour clocks, these are right only once a day if broken. You see these sometimes in hospitals.
My typing? average, but autocomplete and Intellisense compensate for that. I don’t just type code into notepad (well, actually for HTML, I do, because I’m obstinate)
Jeff, surprized nobody commented on your Perl slam there.
Is there a typing trainer for APL???
Your speed was: 53wpm. Four errors.
ins’t instead of isn’t
fact instead of fat
life, instead of life.
glintong instead of glinting
I guess I’ll be fine because I mostly program in Perl with use strict.
And, when I do get paid for programming, it is to make the seemingly impossible, possible. Typing speed is a lot less important in those circumstances. Especially since what you type when you program is drastically different than random blocks of text.
When you key in a program, you use similar constructs over and over and develop a better muscle memory for those types of text. When compilation and testing are quick, you catch errors early and often.
This post seems like an attempt to generate a lot of comments on an essentially pointless topic. You seem to have succeeded.
– Sinan
Your speed was: 28wpm.
Congratulations! You made no mistakes, practice does make perfect.
I cannot touch type. I type with my left hand, using my right for just the Shift key and Enter etc.
To perform this test I am hampered by looking at the screen. For most of the typing that I do, input comes from my head and so I am faster. This test of limited use I believe.
I certainly agree and here’s why: I recently had a job where I was forced to learn and use only vim. (I am now a convert and looking to implement eclim wherever I can). however, In an environment controlled by a senior aka senile developer I was at the mercy of not understanding my editor as well as a fairly new language and template style. As a result, while I grasped the structure without immediate code completion and an easy copy and paste, some of my most time consuming bugs where simply typos.
This post is so wrong IMHO. Typing speed is unrelated to programmer productivity, unless of course you are typing in listings from an old magazine 
As long as you can type to a reasonable standard it will not hamper the quality of your code. I can’t believe you wrote this article seriously ?
Screw yer WPM - I can use VI
Typing fast is important for programming effectively. I have often ended up in the same situation you describe, where you walk into a room and not remember why you are there, but with typing. I’m working on a program, and I run into a difficult problem to solve. I sit back for a while to come up with a solution, and when I have it I try to type it in fast enough so I don’t forget it. If I go too slow, the idea is lost.
I type on a Dvorak keyboard, and I have for a few years now. For me Dvorak feels a lot more comfortable. I am not tempted to look down on the keys, because the keys do not match what I type. This means I can type without hunting for the keys, and I can rely solely on muscle-memory. I’m sure you can learn this with qwerty as well, but it is easier with Dvorak. I don’t type very fast though, I only got 64wpm on that test. But typing on Dvorak feels more comfortable.
50 WPM.
Not the best compared to the ninjas here, but I do believe that I type fast enough to
1)not look ridiculous and
2)not be slowed down by it
I’d rather have a colleague that types at 30WPM but knows what the hell he is doing, than someone that types at 80WPM and never heard of unit testing or IoC…just sayin’! And believe me, we find much more of the latter than the former.
That’s a pretty gay keyboard XD
Hm, 64 with three mistakes.
But to be honest, I was at the same time listening (and actually paying attention to) the stackoverflow podcast
The best way to become a touch typist is through typing, and lots of it.
It also helps to have a nice keyboard, as discussed below.
Hail to the typists!
Indeed: and real typists use badass keyboards, like the Customizer I describe here:
http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/product-review-unicomp-customizer-keyboard
I never learned to properly touch-type - I can type fast enough to get by though, and I find the type of things I type regularly I can do very fast.
I only scored 71wpm on that test, but English prose like that isn’t my usual thing. I can bang out C/C++ and random gibberish like Perl code much, much faster
Hogwash. Software development is a lot more than just typing and faster typing doesn’t make for better code. I understand Jeff’s analogy of forgetting why you walked into a room (which happens to me as well), but if you’re forgetting stuff because you aren’t typing fast enough, then perhaps typing speed isn’t your biggest problem.
I’m a decent typist (78 wpm), but I work with someone who types everything with the index finger on each hand. He’s not fast, but he’s been doing it for 25+ years and is one of the best developers in my group, by which I mean he writes good code. The ability to write good code, which at the end of the day is all we’re trying to do, is unrelated to the ability to type quickly. I agree that being a good typist is an advantage, but typists first, programmers second implies that being a good typist is a more important skill for a programmer than actually being a good programmer.
Extra-pedantic clock analogy comment: A broken analog clock is right twice a day because when it stops, it’s still showing some time. When a digital clock is broken, it generally doesn’t show anything on the display, so it’s never right.
60 wpm no mistakes.
Sometimes Jeff I really think you’re on to something. Other times(this post and last post), I think you’re just finding something you do well and then proclaiming its essential for a programmer.
Typing is important – it’s how we get the code into the machine. But there are so many other things to worry about and perfect that are FAR more important. I think being a bad typist isn’t that big of a deal. Our administrative assistant is a really fast typer. Maybe she should be the coder and I’ll take her job.
Listen to music and type the lyrics as you’re listening. Start with something slow like Tea for Two, and gradually move up to REM’s It’s the End of the World as We Know It. Good luck with that one.
Oh, man, that paragraph about forgetting what you walked into a room for is me to a T. This happens to me so often that I wonder how my brain isn’t swiss cheese at this point.
Also, I know quite a few fellow Computer Science students who can’t touch type. It’s weird when you ask them to type a simple string into Google, and it takes 30 seconds for them to complete it.
Why do you need to write code fast? Sounds like you need to think of a program to write that code for you. Less is better.
I guarantee ctrl-space auto complete is faster. hehehe
I think the issue isn’t typing speed, it’s that you can type as fast as you can verbalize internally. You don’t have any conscious thought of what you’re doing, it just ‘happens’. Typing 40 wpm isn’t important if that’s as fast as you can think. 
Hunt-and-pecking is fatal, though, since it means that you don’t have a good ‘flow’.
That’s why vi was the editor of the gods. (Emacs also, as much as it pains me to say that, but still better than the current IDE crap.) You didn’t have to break your thought to find the mouse, highlight something, and then go back to the keyboard. You just thought I need to delete these three lines and poof they were gone.
As for typing speed, I remember typing a block of code once as a receptionist/admin walked by. She stopped, spun around, and demanded to know how I could type so fast (typically 65-70 wpm). And how I could do it when I was doing it WRONG. Like many people I’m self taught and my hand position is wrong, I hit about 2/3 of the keys with my right hand (rotating it at my wrist), etc. But when you think about it, it makes sense since I’m a large guy and keyboard sizes were probably standardized for the far smaller women of the early 20th century. She honestly seemed to be offended that a mere engineer could type faster than a professional like herself. Uh, yeah.
I concur with Theta, I got 58wpm with no errors, french is my natural language. But, I do touch-type no looking at the keyboard, just the screen.
And I can honestly say that I type much much more quicker when I am writing my own stuff. In that text there, I had to pause for certain words and names, make sure to get them out properly. Also, in programming the subset of words is much more limited and we have all those strange characters/operators to add and of course the numbers.
In my work I have remarked that my muscles learn to type the words out as a whole, not the individual letters and the letters come out much faster.
Finally, just a funny thing I am often experiencing. When I am really deep in thoughts and my hands are flying over the keyboard, if someone steps up by my office, I can look at him and start a discussion with him while my hands finish the sentence/paragraph that has been queued in my brain. It is always disconcerting for the visitor and they hesitate to pursue the discussion while I am still typing away.
My thought is that if I were typing faster (I think I am running more or less around 90 wpms in those moments) my brain wouldn’t have to keep this pipeline of data. Or my brain would just work even faster and faster, I don’t know. Ultimately, I wonder what would be the speed limit that the brain can think ahead in WPMs?