3 ms·
For programming, words-per-minute typing speed isn't so important. Just typing characters is a small fraction of your input. You're doing all sorts of other o
by T-hawk 11y ago
For programming, words-per-minute typing speed isn't so important. Just typing characters is a small fraction of your input. You're doing all sorts of other operations - moving and pasting expressions and lines, adjusting indentation, switching to another window with documentation. These operations go all over the function keys, navigation keys (home, page down, etc), arrow keys, modified by all sorts of chords (ctrl, alt, apple, etc). None of that is captured by the traditional words-per-minute typing metric.
For programming, a better characterization is actions-per-minute, like in Starcraft. I can navigate my IDE and OS noticeably faster than most other developers I've met. Especially non-technical folks are amazed by the speed that I can compile and tab over to the explorer window to copy the output to a staging server, faster than they even register what they're watching. Actions-per-minute and the accuracy of them does matter for the speed and productivity of a given programmer.
- ry_ry 11y agoI'm not convinced apm makes a more productive programmer. One of the juniors on my team actually asked me the other day how many lines of code he should ideally produce per day. I told him that as far as I was concerned, anthing below zero lines was pretty cool.