Thanks everybody for your responses! This is very illuminating.
I'm learning that it's hard to ask the question you really want to ask. I wonder how folks would have responded if I'd said "Imagine you could save 10 minutes a day by learning how to touch-type. Would that be worth it?"
Perhaps in a year I'll re-post from that perspective :)
I can't touch type but saving 10 minutes a day hardly seems worth the effort.
I save much more than that by not writing code fast, instead taking the time to work out how I can solve the problem with the minimum of code.
Code left out seldom goes wrong.
To play devil's advocate: If you could save 10 minutes doing that, and then another 10 typing emails faster, you wouldn't? Over the course of 30 years typing emails you wouldn't want to save that time?
In theory yes, I would love to...but:
I'm my experience, people who can type write long rambling emails full of extraneous information. Whereas I have spent years learning to trim mine too the absolute minimum. Most of my emails consist of single line answers "done”, ”I'll take a look", etc.
Every word I don't type saves other people reading time.
Work expands to fill the space available, if you can type fast you just end up typing more.
In my opinion it's not a must have for developers but a nice to have for every person which writes a lot of lines every day (this includes developers to me).
I don't thing that saved time is the most important thing here. I have started to learn touch typing for beeing better at vim. Then I found out that learning touch typing was really fun to me. Love hearing music and get in the flow of typing without thinking about anything. I use Ratatype for doings so but there are many good free soltutions for learning how to touch type.
For me the result was, better vim experience and less effort => more fun while writing and coding every day. :D
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Thanks everybody for your responses! This is very illuminating.
I'm learning that it's hard to ask the question you really want to ask. I wonder how folks would have responded if I'd said "Imagine you could save 10 minutes a day by learning how to touch-type. Would that be worth it?"
Perhaps in a year I'll re-post from that perspective :)
I can't touch type but saving 10 minutes a day hardly seems worth the effort.
I save much more than that by not writing code fast, instead taking the time to work out how I can solve the problem with the minimum of code.
Code left out seldom goes wrong.
100% agree about removing superfluous code.
To play devil's advocate: If you could save 10 minutes doing that, and then another 10 typing emails faster, you wouldn't? Over the course of 30 years typing emails you wouldn't want to save that time?
In theory yes, I would love to...but:
I'm my experience, people who can type write long rambling emails full of extraneous information. Whereas I have spent years learning to trim mine too the absolute minimum. Most of my emails consist of single line answers "done”, ”I'll take a look", etc.
Every word I don't type saves other people reading time.
Work expands to fill the space available, if you can type fast you just end up typing more.
In my opinion it's not a must have for developers but a nice to have for every person which writes a lot of lines every day (this includes developers to me).
I don't thing that saved time is the most important thing here. I have started to learn touch typing for beeing better at vim. Then I found out that learning touch typing was really fun to me. Love hearing music and get in the flow of typing without thinking about anything. I use Ratatype for doings so but there are many good free soltutions for learning how to touch type.
For me the result was, better vim experience and less effort => more fun while writing and coding every day. :D