I personally touch-type maybe 50 wpm but that's for documentation, not code. If you are attempting to create code at the speed that you type, you are insane ... or you will be soon, when you try to debug it.
If someone was lucky enough to think faster than they could type, they'd be able to think twice before they added more code to a program - a good thing!
Just think. Is wpm a measure of a great writer? How could it be a measure of a great programmer.
I'm not sure what a "great hacker" is. Are they something like sysadmin or maybe someone who does security?
See my comment above. I spend a lot of time typing, even though I reuse a lot of code. (I write a lot of code: http://github.com/jrockway)
It's nice to think that code types itself, but it doesn't. If you have no ideas, then it doesn't matter how fast you can express them as code. If you have a lot of ideas, though, you don't want to wait for your fingers to slowly tell them to the computer. You want the computer to know quickly, so you can move on to the next task. That's why typing is important. There is no brain/computer interface yet, so you have to do it with your hands and the keyboard. Suboptimal, but them's the breaks.
I personally touch-type maybe 50 wpm but that's for documentation, not code. If you are attempting to create code at the speed that you type, you are insane ... or you will be soon, when you try to debug it.
If someone was lucky enough to think faster than they could type, they'd be able to think twice before they added more code to a program - a good thing!
Just think. Is wpm a measure of a great writer? How could it be a measure of a great programmer.
I'm not sure what a "great hacker" is. Are they something like sysadmin or maybe someone who does security?