Don't Program With Two Fingers

In his recent post, Abhijit Nadgouda of ifacethoughts argues that touch typing is not a necessity for programming.

I'm going to take the opposing view here: you really, really need to touch-type if you're going to be a programmer. Abhijit correctly points out that modern IDEs provide auto-completion and the like. That covers for the loss of productivity, and many people are comfortable with that.

Where this breaks down, however, is the documentation. Who is going to document their code better - the touch-typist or the two-finger typist? Sadly, the auto-completion engine fails to come to the slow typist's rescue.

So while the slow typist might be successful in writing his code, it's the people who read it later who will find themselves in a pickle.

Happy typing!