Time is the only real currency we have
I agree with the sentiment of this article, but strongly disagree with the title, and the advice to learn to type fast.<p>The title is abuse (or misunderstanding) of the word &quot;currency&quot;.  Currency is an accounting mechanism.  Time is, well, something else.  It&#x27;s an incredibly valuable commodity, a necessary (but not sufficient) ingredient for any activity and hence any kind of progress, and one which you cannot make more of and so is worth using wisely.  But comparing it to <i>currency</i> is a category error.<p>Which brings me to my second point: it seems intuitively obvious that if you want to use time wisely you should use it efficiently, and typing faster is more efficient than typing slower.  But this overlooks a crucial point: typing faster can only produce a linear improvement in your efficiency.  If you type twice as fast, you will be able to type twice as many characters in the same amount of time.  But there is another dynamic in play: if you type slowly, then the cost of typing will become more painfully evident to you, and that can motivate you to think about ways to type less, and that can lead to <i>exponential</i> improvements in typing efficiency.<p>I have been coding for forty-one years.  I never learned proper touch-typing, and so my typing has always been quite slow by coder standards.  As a result, typing boilerplate is extremely painful for me, and I try to avoid it at all costs.  That drove me to learn Lisp, and that has led me to a coding style where I only need a tiny fraction of the code that, say, a Java programmer needs to do the same job.  So yes, I type 2x slower, but I only have to type 0.1x the amount of code for a net win of 5x.  And the techniques that lead me to that win can be applied recursively.  There are domains in which I can get 100x or 1000x improvements (i.e. 1 line of Lisp code is the equivalent of 1000 lines of Java or C).  I never would have been motivated to learn those techniques if I were able to type fast.