You're wrong. Learn to type well and then come back and tell us it didn't make you a better programmer.
If you don't know how to type, then you're wasting brain cycles looking for keys when you have to type, cycles that would otherwise be spent thinking up good identifiers and nice function names. Not knowing how to type also means you'll choose terse identifiers rather than clear ones because it's too much work typing longer names.
Typing well is a critical skill for a programmer and the only programmers who don't think so are the ones who can't type.
I "type" most words when I'm programming by hitting two or three initial letters, and then pressing M-/ to complete (emacs does that by scanning all open buffers for something that matches, usually quicker than anyone could type the whole word).
I don't choose terse identifiers, I choose long ones that I know emacs will be able to find completions for easily.
Typing faster helps everyone. Programming is more than just writing code. It's communicating with people, documenting bugs, documenting code, etc. If you're telling me you never run into a situation in which being able to type faster would help you, then I'm saying I don't believe you.
This very conversation is easier to have if you can type your thoughts as you have them whilst not being distracted by hunting and pecking.
What about the cost of not learning it? Like potential neck pain, slower thinking, over-reliance on code completion (it takes your brain some processing time to decide what will be long enough to produce the right completion but not too long to waste keystrokes), less ability to communicate effectively.
And the cost of learning it is laughable. You just have to practice a bit for 3 days to learn to get the right fingers on the right keys from memory. The key to learning quickly is that you try to reproduce some text on the screen while NOT LOOKING at the keyboard, and you go as slowly as you need to avoid looking up (well, down), it doesn't matter if it takes 15 seconds for one keystroke at first. The important thing is to try a recall from memory at all costs before you finally know you've really completely forgotten and then look it up. And you do like this for each letter. You'll reduce your latency and learn the whole layout quite fast. After that it's just a matter of practicing for a few weeks and you'll be up at a reasonable 30wpm in no time.
If you don't have to look at the keyboard then you know how to type. Don't get hung up on whether it's proper or not. When people say someone doesn't know how to type, it explicitly means they have to look at the keyboard.
however, as a programmer who does have to type a lot, using the correct fingers would help you in the long run because at some point you will have repetitive stress problems, so bit the bullet and do it. The cost is tiny and certainly nothing to fear or put off.
Do you really spend that much time typing? I spend most time thinking :/
Obviously there's a lower bound, if you have to look at the keyboard then you probably need to improve, but the importance of being able to touch type perfectly is overplayed.
Guess what, if you typed faster you'd spend even less time typing... or, you'd spend just as much time typing but would produce more. Or a bit of both.
If you don't know how to type, then you're wasting brain cycles looking for keys when you have to type, cycles that would otherwise be spent thinking up good identifiers and nice function names. Not knowing how to type also means you'll choose terse identifiers rather than clear ones because it's too much work typing longer names.
Typing well is a critical skill for a programmer and the only programmers who don't think so are the ones who can't type.