Agreed. The best programmer I ever knew had severe carpal tunnel syndrome and had to use Dragon Dictate. Yet he could do things that teams of other programmers couldn't.
Before I arrived he had made a network monitoring system more than 100x faster when the team responsible for it was on vacation. (The CEO reported that the events now flew by, whereas before you could easily observe the event stream crawling.) He later single-handedly implemented and maintained the router configuration system for an ISP that spanned the US and there was never a single (non-cosmetic) bug reported against it in the 10 years I was there, even in the face of changing requirements, new hardware, and the company constantly coming out with new connectivity services.
He had learned to program in the days of punched cards, and he would do all his thinking on paper before he started coding. He would then dictate the code, top to bottom, without any bugs.
Before I arrived he had made a network monitoring system more than 100x faster when the team responsible for it was on vacation. (The CEO reported that the events now flew by, whereas before you could easily observe the event stream crawling.) He later single-handedly implemented and maintained the router configuration system for an ISP that spanned the US and there was never a single (non-cosmetic) bug reported against it in the 10 years I was there, even in the face of changing requirements, new hardware, and the company constantly coming out with new connectivity services.
He had learned to program in the days of punched cards, and he would do all his thinking on paper before he started coding. He would then dictate the code, top to bottom, without any bugs.
I'm willing to concede that he's an outlier.