I guessed that this would be arguing something similar to the "tests should be very fast" argument. There, the point is that anything that causes you to context shift is bad. The feedback loop of code/test/break/fix is everything.

But I think after reading that the argument was more akin to webpage load times. Sure, a few extra seconds isn't measurably a lot, but there's a feeling of responsiveness that matters to our psyche, even if according to wall time it's not a big deal. This I find more plausible. I've seen code. I know how damn lazy we can be. People seem to be willing to spend hours of pain to avoid writing tiny helper structs, or writing helper methods, or giving functions/variables names with multiple words.

Still, 80 wpm seems like a lot off hand. That's coming up on regular speaking speed. I wonder if I could test the difference on myself to see if it bothered me; maybe add something that slows my typing rate to 80?