Typing is an asset for those who use a command line interface as well. It's more than just a simple reduction of latency. If you are a slow typist, it's likely

Typing is an asset for those who use a command line interface as well. It's more than just a simple reduction of latency. If you are a slow typist, it's likely that your horizon of possibilities for leveraging the power of quick and easy shell commands is so small that you'd be better off using a mouse and an IDE. If you've ever witnessed an extremely fast command line whiz in action, you realize just how effective of a weapon their typing speed is. When the latency between knowing what you want to do and getting it done disappears, the depth at which you search a tree of possible commands and experiments increases. In coding there are situations in which typing fast lets you experiment faster. For example, when you're trying to narrow down a bug to a few different possibilities, if you can type fast then you can quickly open up a new window and code up a little test application that isolates the problem. The thinking/typing ratio of these kinds of debugging experiments is low, and it has been my experience that most people are loathe to go and actually code up an entirely different program to do a quick test, simply because they don't want to do the typing. In a nutshell, being able to type fast can remove mental barriers and change your approach to programming. Just look at how your approach to using a computer or browsing the Web changes when latency is reduced. Just because your CPU is idle 97% of the time doesn't mean that CPU speed is not important. Just because you spend more time reading a web page than loading it doesn't mean that latency isn't important.