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I got into enough trouble on my 'mountain bike' (VTT - Vélo Tout Terrain here in France). A bit of off-road riding, went over a unexpectedly large bump whilst standing on the pedals (idiot). This was never a problem on the racing bikes I'd used for years which I also rode off-road a lot, but with the fat tyres on the mountain bike the thing rebounded and hit me one heck of a whack in the crutch. It was so violent that it was years before I could really sit comfortably again on anything, hence no piano. Seems OK now, I can sit down again and muscles are OK although veins not so good - trying to get back playing the piano is proving difficult, however. I gave the bike away (my wife insisted I got rid of it) to someone planning to cycle the local canal paths; hope he didn't go over too many bumps or the little b would have got him too. Pity - it was a nice red one..... Sigh, still miss it but have never cycled since - just getting less and less fit

I found being a typist in the past, helped my with the keyboard , and reading music .

There's your problem. You ride a Ninja and you're pretty much destined for a horrific accident.

As you are someone who owns a Japanese piano, I hope this is not any anti-Japanese motorcycle sentiment I hear

Interesting connection. I learned to type a few decades ago and achieved a speed of 40WPM on a mechanical typewriter. By the time computers came along my speed went up to over 60WPM. That was years before I got into playing piano / keyboard. Once a cousin who took piano lessons commented that I have good hands like somebody playing piano. Typing you are aiming for the right keys with the fastest possible time. With music playing you do aim for a steady tempo like typing but raw speed isn't usually the case especially when playing a slow movement.

A typing keyboard is divided into 5 rows of keys while a piano keyboard has just 2 rows and extends much further on both sides. The arm, wrist and hand movements are not the same and your hands shift from L to R. And you're supposed to be playing with graceful gestures than in a mechanical / robotic way. When it comes to reading we're not reading the English alphabet but circles & lines unless the letter names of notes are written into the score.

Somebody in the family made the association that hand movements for typing is similar to piano playing doesn't mean it is a straightforward transition like 1 day you're typing, the next day you learn to play piano sort of thing. The 1 thing both of them have in common is accuracy hitting the keys...

Typing - this helps me with having a good spatial relationship so you can reliable find non-adjacent keys without looking at the keyboard. Motocycle - I have put 50,000 miles on a motorcycle over the last 8 years and do not see any relationship to piano - maybe patience....

Being able to type well and playing piano complement each other. In my school days I got into playing violin. For many years I thought that I would be stuck with that instrument. Once somebody in the family noticed that I have an interest in music and suggested that I take music appreciation classes at the local conservatory. I ended up with a teacher playing piano. I had a few lessons at a young age and didn't get anywhere. Within a month piano was out of my life for good. A few decades later I got myself a keyboard and started playing it. I've been at it since.

Being a good typing is 1 thing but initially didn't convince me to make the leap into piano playing. The equation is probably more true for people who plays piano at an intermediate to advanced level are also good typists but not everybody who can type well plays piano.

It is probably more the case for fast typists that they are more likely to have RSI (repetitive strain injury) than those who play piano well. In order to play well you need to use motions that allow you to reach different keys with the least amount of effort like arm rotation. People who do data entry for a living especially with a numeric keypad their hands are fixed in 1 position all the time they may end up with RSI.

I learned typing as a child, and playing the piano as an older adult. Oh how I wish it was the other way around! I type really fast, and I play the piano really slow.
Well, not that slow, but fast pieces are a struggle.

I don't know if I ever compared typing to pianoing. I was forced to take typing in college. I hated it, the teacher and I disliked each other, and it nearly killed me. I got an A but was up to a couple of hours of practice per day by the final test, and the final test was what determined your grade. (The ashen look on that woman's face when she clicked her stopwatch and saw that she would have to give me an A if I didn't go over the error limit was nearly worth the effort.) I can type about 60 words per minute if no one is watching. Maybe it is like piano! It's very hard for me and I can only do it if no one is watching.

Now did typing forge any kind of neural pathways that help with piano? I just don't know. I certainly have seen my brain confuse the two. I use some training software and I have a monitor on the wall in front of me and a computer keyboard just on the other side of the digital piano. I have caught myself starting to compose an email reply with the piano...

When I learned to type years ago, I had a old computer with barely 64K RAM. And 1 of my first programs was a typing tutor. Sort of like people learning to play piano with Piano Marvel. Practiced on the keyboard for the whole summer and ended up passing the typing course easily.

My journey with the piano came years later with a change of attitude. Coming from a non-musical family, when I was younger, my parents decided that nobody in the family had the talent for music. Nobody in the family would get a teacher to learn piano. I'm the only exception. Nobody in the family encouraged me to get into playing music so I waited until I moved out before getting my first piano keyboard.

My parents didn't grow up with the computer or cellphone around. Mom learned to use a cellphone and an iPad in her mid-80s. A decade ago computer skills included typing but nowadays people can send & receive Email with a touch screen without the hassle of touch typing. Learn to play piano? I don't think mom & dad would even get into it. People tend to perceive computer skills as an essential because we rely on our electronic devices for news & info but playing piano is more of a personal hobby.

When it comes to typing there are 2 kinds: touch typist and 2-finger typist. Someone in the family worked in the computer field as a Technical Support Technician for many years and never acquired proper typing skills but he was good at the keyboard with just 2 fingers. Unless your job requires that you type documents people can get by as a 2-finger typist. I don't think anybody would get by playing the piano with just 2 fingers unless he/she have hands with missing fingers.

Before I got cancer, I was a software engineer. In my career I wrote many thousands of lines of code, but never did learn to touch type. Wish I had though. I can't begin to imagine how many hours I've wasted on debugging typos.

I could be called a software engineer, whatever that is. Spend my work day programming.

I can touch type, but for much of programming I don't think it is that much more productive than being a two finger pecking typist.

My touch typing comes into its own when writing text like this. There is just too much that is different with programming than writing for touch typing to add hugely to being productive. It helps but so many characters you need are not just upper or lower case letters. I can type those without looking but they are clumsier and slower to reach from the default touch typing hand positions.

Retired developer here. Not retired, just out of that biz. Most of the men I worked with never learned to touch type. I only did because it was forced on me. I don't feel it impacted their productivity. Well, maybe a tiny bit once email came along.

One thing I noticed was that in 30 plus years I never saw one developer learn to touch type if he didn't start out that way. Once they get to about 40 wpm with 2 fingers they aren't going to spend endless hours typing ASDF just to learn to email without looking at the keyboard. Maybe there is a parallel there to what the piano teachers say about breaking bad habits and reteaching someone who started on youtube, et al.

Another programmer in a past life. I learned to touch type in school when nothing fit my class schedule except an introduction to business class, and I didn't know that business meant learning to type. LOL. I have not found any of the typing skills useful for programming. One programs in one's mind, not one's fingers most of the time (I make an exception for COBOL programmers! LOL)

Oh dear - me too. I started in ICL's 'assembly' language and those of us using it looked on COBOL in that way too. Still, I did use COBOL occasionally, but only when nobody was looking

Another programmer here! I'm currently finding myself endlessly facing keyboards. The one I visit after work gives me much more pleasure, the one at work is means to an end to some extend (after 25 years of going at it full time).

p.s. Sorry for OT, I don't ride a motorcycle, but my husband does. Love wind on my face though. Feel like a dog who sticks his head of the car window.

No problem about the OTs.

I work for a software company myself. I learned to touch type at University, shortly before writing my final paper. I learned on a typewriter, which means that today when I type on a computer, it's noisy.
What I also notice is that when I type on a computer keyboard immediately after playing the piano, I have a short moment where I have trouble to adjust. Not the same size and feel.
But I have the subjective impression that the adjustment is more difficult when switching from a digital keyboard to a computer keyboard, then when switching from my grand piano keyboard to a computer keyboard.

Of course, that impression could be entirely in my head.

I agree that much coding isn't really amenable to touch typing, but it would be nice to be able to type boilerplate code, like loop conditionals, without making stupid little mistakes. The coders I know who can touch type spend way less time rooting out little typos in stuff like that.

I’m a programmer too. I’ve spent the last nine years writing iOS apps. I guess I never really learned to touch type but it never really slowed me down. In XCode, all loop constructs and conditionals are created by autocomplete, I type very few characters for anything. All variables are also autocompleted.

I had learnt touch typing through a game. With piano, it has not helped me much other than the psychological benefit in the beginning, that it’s possible to play the notes without looking at the keyboard. It does help with all kinds of typing, programming or otherwise. But the real speed benefit in programming, I feel, comes from knowing the IDEs well, and getting quick with all the keyboard shortcuts and autocomplete features they provide.

One thing about touch typing that does help with programming, is catching the typos as and when they happen. In IDEs, it’s not much of a problem. But a few of my past jobs have been for start-ups, which were often in fire fighting mode. Many a times I’d have to write and run a quick script directly on the server, or change some other configuration asap, for which I’ve gotten used to vim. In these scenarios, typos matter a lot. More than anything else though, focus matters here, and speed and muscle memory can even have a negative effect sometimes. In one of my earlier jobs, I made the typo crontab -r instead of crontab -e, and hit enter before I could stop myself (this deletes all the scheduled jobs instead of opening the editor). Warnings or backups were not configured on the server. So a horrible, terrible day for me and my poor teammates