Ask HN: WPM for a Programmer

3 points·golanggeek··6 comments

When I try to find the words per minute, I average around 80 wpm.

So, what do you average.

And as a programmer what should be the wpm level that maximizes your efficiency

I've only ever measured WPM in competitive environments, where I could get up to 190-ish or so from memory. When I'm writing, being able to do it fast helps since I can get my stream of consciousness down as I'm thinking it. But when coding, to me being able to type fast is not important at all. I stop to think about and review the logic so much that there's usually no opportunity to or reason to take advantage of typing faster.

WPM only matters if you're extremely slow, like in the ~30-50 range maybe, unless you don't really have to think about anything. If you know exactly what it is that you'll be typing for a prolonged period of time, then it's nice to be fast, but you won't be as fast as a typing test. On typing tests I'm usually around 90-105 or something.

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

-- Bill Gates

You are counting the wrong thing.

You should measure how much code you are not writing:

https://github.com/rmcnew/nocode#no-code-or-nihilist-softwar...

I agree.

I’m not counting the WPM as a measure to see if one is a good programmer.

I just want to sharpen the tools that one needs

When writing emails I'll type as fast as I can, but when writing code I rarely exceed an average of 40-50 wpm.

If you spend more than 20% of your time typing, you're probably not stopping to think about what you're doing enough.

I think you are talking about typing with all your fingers.

In my opinion, all that matters is that you look at the screen while typing, not at the keyboard.

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