Ask HN: WPM for a Programmer

3 points by golanggeek 3 years ago | 6 comments

When I try to find the words per minute, I average around 80 wpm.

So, what do you average.

And as a programmer what should be the wpm level that maximizes your efficiency

drakonka 3 years ago |

I've only ever measured WPM in competitive environments, where I could get up to 190-ish or so from memory. When I'm writing, being able to do it fast helps since I can get my stream of consciousness down as I'm thinking it. But when coding, to me being able to type fast is not important at all. I stop to think about and review the logic so much that there's usually no opportunity to or reason to take advantage of typing faster.

brailsafe 3 years ago |

WPM only matters if you're extremely slow, like in the ~30-50 range maybe, unless you don't really have to think about anything. If you know exactly what it is that you'll be typing for a prolonged period of time, then it's nice to be fast, but you won't be as fast as a typing test. On typing tests I'm usually around 90-105 or something.

thesuperbigfrog 3 years ago |

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

-- Bill Gates

You are counting the wrong thing.

You should measure how much code you are not writing:

https://github.com/rmcnew/nocode#no-code-or-nihilist-softwar...

golanggeek 3 years ago | |

I agree.

I’m not counting the WPM as a measure to see if one is a good programmer.

I just want to sharpen the tools that one needs

kstenerud 3 years ago |

When writing emails I'll type as fast as I can, but when writing code I rarely exceed an average of 40-50 wpm.

If you spend more than 20% of your time typing, you're probably not stopping to think about what you're doing enough.

controversial97 3 years ago |

I think you are talking about typing with all your fingers.

In my opinion, all that matters is that you look at the screen while typing, not at the keyboard.