To me, being a programmer without being a touch typist is like being a bicycle messenger without knowing how to ride a bike. So, you push the bike as you run along beside it. Sure, you'll get to your destination, but slower, and you'll look ridiculous. I once knew a programmer who couldn't touch type, and he really needed all the brainpower at his disposal to do his job, but he wasted 10 percent of it looking back and forth between the keyboard and screen hunting and pecking. Trying to help him out was an exercise in patience. Jesus, learn to touch type, you can rail against it all you like but if you sit down and spend the two or three weeks to do it, you'll be thanking yourself for the rest of your career for having done it. Refusing to do it just plain stupid.
I whole-heartedly agree with you. In fact, I have the impression that there's a rather interesting variation of the Dunning-Kruger effect in play on this issue. Usually, mentioning DK implies a derogatory connotation (akin "dumb people don't notice that they're dumb"), but in this case, many actually very bright people can't imagine the upsides of touch typing because they never experienced them themselves. There also seems to be a similar discussion whenever Vim and Emacs bindings come up. Yes, you don't technically need them, but they sure help you manipulating code at a pace where you're not constantly loosing your train of thought because of some small change you're throwing in.
I have no problem with people who decide that the learning curve of both is not for them. The thing I personally take issue with is when someone then tries to explain to me that those upsides are effectively nil, because "you're not really typing that much all day anyway". I call BS on that. If your code is non-trivial and you're trying to make it readable, you are going to iterate on it a couple of times. No amount of scribbling and diagrams is going to prevent that - even with the perfect data layout, the actual logic will need tweaking until it's suitable. So, the only argument you're then making from my perspective is that you actually don't care about readability, at which point there's a much bigger elephant in the room than your typing style.
