[tripzilch]

re. your rough guess: 30 wpm is actually kind of slow, according to Wikipedia the "average computer user" types at 33 wpm. I'd expect someone who spends most of his time at the computer to do quite a bit better even if they never learned to touch-type. I thought I'd time myself copying the first two paragraphs of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Alphanumeric_e... (1024 characters at the standard 5 per word = 204.8 words) and got 70 wpm! I'm a bit surprised by that myself, TBH, since I don't "properly" touch-type either--I'd probably get a significant drop if I had to type more than that though, but as you say programming goes in bursts so that's not much of an issue here.

As far as you wondering what use typing speed is to a programmer:

1) if you can type faster, it takes less effort to fix cosmetic mistakes and you do so more often. you must have noticed as well when looking over the shoulder of a slow typer they seem to make more errors? or maybe it just seems more tedious because you're waiting on it. you must have also seen that a really skilled typist can make an error and have it corrected before you hardly notice it (which is because they feel their fingers slipped).

2) in a similar sense, if you type faster, it takes less effort to quickly try something out. just type it out, maybe not even immediately test it, because as you see it on the screen you can more easily reason about it and make corrections before you do. if you type slower, you're more likely to get stuck halfway writing a block of code because you're thinking "wait this isn't right" and start doing proto premature optimization (well, that's my problem, I start thinking about what is the best/most concise/pythonic/readable way to write this code halfway, before I even got the rough structure down. I find it's almost always better to first write down something that works).

3) if you type faster you spend less time writing comments on HN and can get back to programming sooner.