Programmers, what's your typing speed?

[roosevelt]

Hi,

 

Lately, I have been noticing that programming for hours is taking a toll on my wrist and fingers. Wearing a splint does help but I feel I would rather have a stronger hand than use a splint.

 

I don

[Mulrian]

I can definitely relate to that. I am a fast typer when I want to, but it's just a hell of a lot of effort to keep up. I tend to type pretty quickly when just writing prose, but deliberately slow down when coding. Mainly because it gives me time to think about what code I'm writing whilst I'm writing it and what I'll do next which I find useful. Another upside is that when I slow down when coding I barely make any mistakes at all, even with weird character combinations, whereas I do a lot more when going full speed and end up wasting time deleting and redoing.

[Guest]

Very, very low. But that is down to the fact that I'm most of the times reading documentation and trying to make something work. If I know what I am doing, then it is fast enough, I'd say, especially since Visual Studio helps a lot with everything nowadays when it comes to writing the actual code.

[Max Norris]

Yea it depends on what I'm typing too.. if I'm doing plain text like typing an email, documentation or whatever, I usually do around 95 WPM or so accurately, can go faster but then I tend to start making mistakes. But it's probably a fair assumption that most people will drop significantly in speed while coding due to special characters, thinking about what they're doing, switching tasks, etc etc, never mind most IDEs will do a lot of the typing for you to begin with like with Intellisense, code completion/refactoring and whatnot and that makes it hard to gauge speed too.

[firey]

  On 11/05/2015 at 16:16, Max Norris said:

Yea it depends on what I'm typing too.. if I'm doing plain text like typing an email, documentation or whatever, I usually do around 95 WPM or so accurately, can go faster but then I tend to start making mistakes. But it's probably a fair assumption that most people will drop significantly in speed while coding due to special characters, thinking about what they're doing, switching tasks, etc etc, never mind most IDEs will do a lot of the typing for you to begin with like with Intellisense, code completion/refactoring and whatnot and that makes it hard to gauge speed too.

Same, like I don't know exactly how fast I type, definitely not the fastest.  It depends on how much thinking I have to do with my writing.  I mean, I can write without looking at the keyboard but the longer the words.. the longer it takes me to write it.  I still only really type with one finger on each hand I can't do the multi finger typing... but I can do it without looking.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

1 -3 words per minute. That was the result from some online typing test my wife made me take.

 

I'd say it was wrong, but then who'd believe me?

 

In reality, I'm not sure how important typing speed is when programming. Very rarely am I just "hammering out code". Usually most of my time and effort is in mentally securing what I'm doing (either researching the code base, reading documentation, or figuring out how I'm going to code something)... The actual code typing doesn't usually take long at all.

[Andre S. Veteran]

About 80 wpm when I'm taking a typing test and really try hard. But as others mentioned, you don't need high typing speed to be a good programmer. If anything low typing speed might push you towards more minimal and succint code that is simpler to understand.

 

  On 11/05/2015 at 16:25, LogicalApex said:

1 -3 words per minute. That was the result from some online typing test my wife made me take.

 

I'd say it was wrong, but then who'd believe me?

If that's true, then it just took you between 30 and 90 minutes to write that post. I find that quite hard to believe

Are you sure it's not 1-3 words per second?

[firey]

  On 11/05/2015 at 19:33, Andre S. said:

If that's true, then it just took you between 30 and 90 minutes to write that post. I find that quite hard to believe

Are you sure it's not 1-3 words per second?

I write at 1-3 words per minute.  This post took me 9 minutes to write

[Squirrelington]

1 key per keystroke.

[technord]

erm, programmers spend their time scratching heads and debugging code, not typing 100 words a minute

 

although some of the code I have had to debug in the past, you could be right!

[tsupersonic]

I can type 100-110 wpm, but not when I'm programming. I usually have to take the time to think through the code.

[+Random Stranger Subscriber¹]

  On 11/05/2015 at 20:07, tsupersonic said:

I can type 100-110 wpm, but not when I'm programming. I usually have to take the time to think through the code.

 

yeah, coding wpm, and dictation is obviously different speed.

[Obry]

I feel your pain. I try to pace myself but when I'm working on something that I simply have lots of code to write (ie prototyping something or writing boilerplate code) I too tend to go too fast to the point of exhaustion. I am not as good at taking breaks either so my wrists ache like hell...

[+Zagadka Subscriber²]

Accuracy is far more important than speed. Everything you write you need to plan ahead and check afterwards.

[gohpep]

When I don't know what I'm writing, 10 wam.

When I have a general idea of what to write, 50-70 wam.

When I'm just typing it from somwhere, 95 wam.

When I'm using Stack Overflow, 1000 wam.

[netty2014]

"it dosn't matter really"   as long as you dont get to many errors on debug,   if you do you going to fast lol 

[vcfan]

its over 9000

[strollin]

I've never been a fast typist, my kids razz me and tell me that for someone who has been using computers as long as I have, I should type much faster.  I always tell them that I don't get paid to type fast, I get paid for knowing what to type.

[astropheed Veteran]

I type English at roughly 75-85 WPM with a decent level of accuracy.

 

I program significantly slower. There is no real measurable speed since typing isn't what takes time, it's thinking about what to type. Maybe 30-80 Lines an hour? Not sure.

[Brian M. Veteran]

I just did an online test (bear in mind it's 1:21am!) and I got 98wpm.

When coding, I'd never get anywhere near that though .

[Krome]

During high school years, when I take typing class, my speed was a little bit over 40wpm.  That is not counting the errors.  But as years gone by, I can type way faster.

[The Evil Overlord]

On the pain aspect, OP have you considered buying some tennis balls and making a tiny puncture into them?

Stay with me

 

It helps me when I write (lately I get all sorts of pain and cramps when handwriting, and have found that maybe 15-30 minutes of squeezing a punctured tennis ball helps, (good stress relief too, as you can still throw it)

[smilesumo]

I type faster writing code, as I program every day for my job, than I do typing this message or a normal document. I think my fingers are just used to hitting certain keys and get confused when typing normal text

[+FloatingFatMan Subscriber¹]

  On 11/05/2015 at 20:07, tsupersonic said:

I can type 100-110 wpm, but not when I'm programming. I usually have to take the time to think through the code.

 

I agree. At peek, I can hit 130wpm, but not when coding. Too much thinking to do for that kind of speed.  I figure I probably pull about half that when coding, and less if debugging.

[Andre S. Veteran]

  On 12/05/2015 at 00:16, astropheed said:

I program significantly slower. There is no real measurable speed since typing isn't what takes time, it's thinking about what to type. Maybe 30-80 Lines an hour? Not sure.

[astropheed Veteran]

  On 13/05/2015 at 16:43, Andre S. said: