You may have noticed that our blogging has been kind of light lately. We are in the last stages of getting out a major version upgrade of one of our major products, httpZip, and that tends to cut into our unstructured ponder-and-write time.
It also makes us think about things like programming efficiency and productivity. There are so many factors that go into something as complex as that but simple things matter too. For instance, imagine two programmers of approximately equal ability and diligence. Now imagine that one of them happened to take typing in school and the other one, who didn't, relies on some kind of two- or few-finger hunt-and-peck method. Could this make a big difference in productivity?
You might not think so, since everyone knows programmers who aren't touch typists but who, because they do so much typing in their jobs, seem to be very fast on the keyboard. But it turns out that studies have comfirmed that hunt-and-peck typists don't really approach touch typist speed -- they're lucky to be even half as fast. (At least that's what veteran technologist Robert Lucky says in this interesting little excerpt from his Silicon Dreams.)
Ultimately, and apart from lamenting the fact that more programmers don't take typing in high school, this line of speculation quickly gets us into questions of human-machine interface (imagine writing code at the speed of the court reporter with her -- and it's still usually her -- chord keyboard), and specific implementation issues such as the QWERTY versus Dvorak keyboard controversy (or pseudo-controversy, according to the credible-sounding argument made here by Dvorak fan Dylan McNamee).
We don't have a ton of wisdom to impart on either level here. We just found it interesting, as a thought experiment, that a seemingly small thing like this can have a major impact a big problem like programmer productivity -- a problem that very smart people spend a lot of time trying to address in much bigger ways, both methodological and technological.
For what it's worth, we'll give the last word to a buch of game programmers (and who needs to churn out more code faster than those dudes?) talking about programmers who can't type.
Well, back to the salt mines...