I got an interesting perspective on this in the past week. I type at 110 WPM on a normal QWERTY keyboard, and I use keystrokes to drive my editor and window manager (but not my browser.) I just switched to an ErgoDox configured as mostly QWERTY but ortholinear, split, and with some of the modifier keys and symbols moved around. The first day I was at 16 WPM, now I'm at about 35. (Probably a little slower in syntax-heavy parts.)
The slowdown results in a mindblowingly different working experience. There is so much time in between me designing the program in my head and the program being in my editor. It drastically reduces the degree of interactivity between me and the programming environment, where I can play around with different shapes for the program. Insubstantially small improvements are no longer insubstantially small; I resist making them. I resist writing mini-documentation like detailed commit messages and docstrings. Way less work gets done in a day. I frankly feel totally incompetent.
If there was any doubt in my mind that being good at keyboarding is a worthwhile skill for a programmer, it's certainly gone now.
Every time I work at a place with a heavy, slow (or nonrepeatable) build process I feel this over again. Like I have a giant albatross around my neck.
This is one (two?) of the 12 points it The Joel Score, but I don't think anyone outside of stack overflow uses it. And no answer I've gotten in an interview setting has ever painted the entire picture.
I've had one since last July (using it to type this, actually) and I think it gets better with time. I'm now up to a respectable ~70wpm, which is nowhere close to where I used to be with a "standard" QWERTY, but it's still Good Enough.
I feel the same, but I'm hoping that my heavy laptop use plus a lifetime-so-far of training will allow me to maintain my typing skills on a standard form factor even if I learn something slightly esoteric for my desk.
On the flip side, I found it so frustrating learning colemak on the ErgoDox that I ended up learning a lot of new keybinds for things to save extra typing!
The slowdown results in a mindblowingly different working experience. There is so much time in between me designing the program in my head and the program being in my editor. It drastically reduces the degree of interactivity between me and the programming environment, where I can play around with different shapes for the program. Insubstantially small improvements are no longer insubstantially small; I resist making them. I resist writing mini-documentation like detailed commit messages and docstrings. Way less work gets done in a day. I frankly feel totally incompetent.
If there was any doubt in my mind that being good at keyboarding is a worthwhile skill for a programmer, it's certainly gone now.