> "programmers don’t have some special need for typing speed or ergonomics compared to other office workers."

not sure I can take that for granted; the need for typing speed could come from having to grind through a ton of boilerplate - you can see the desire coming through as intellisense/autocomplete, and from abbreviations like "str", "std", "int", "fn", "<T>", etc. instead of full names. Assume other office workers are writing English to communicate an idea, English doesn't start with public static void main implements EmailMessage, IMemo, getter, setter, whatever whatever. So maybe programmers do have a need for typing speed, because of using such inexpressive languages (APL/J/K programmers need not apply).

> "If we did have a need for speed, for example, we would learn something like Plover since that would make us write at least twice as fast (at least for prose, but I type that quite often.)"

Again, not sure I can take this for granted - Steno is used for transcription, it's basically another way of spelling every word, phonetically. My suspicion is that it's more mental work to use it than it is to write normally. Is it still as fast, as useful, if you also have to come up with what to write? Take this video of record holding court reporter Mark Kislingbury taking transcription:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61c0bEdVtX4

His fingers move slowly to capture fast speech, but he is only writing the sounds down, he goes on to read back from the Steno phonetic transcript which you can see is not fleshed out English prose. That excuses him from any need for capturing homonyms, clashes between multi-syllable words vs separate words, punctuation, spelling, parentheses, caps on abbreviations, commas in numbers, etc.

Now take some person who came up in the search results for Plover videos, writing after ~6 months practise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28v3cm21uAA

The words appear quite quickly, but there are lots of pauses and corrections which means I can approximately keep up with it on a QWERTY keyboard, losing ground when they are in flow and catching up when they pause. Impressive though it is, and maybe a little faster but it's still going to take them a lot more effort to get from here to anything like double this speed. The pauses and corrections suggest to me that it takes a lot more thought to do it - and the corrections of Steno mistakes aren't typos of individual letters in words, they're whole sound and word changes like REGOURDLESS instead of REGARDLESS and "Steno is much more ergonomic than questionnaire" instead of "than QWERTY". That is, a typo left in a normal typing document is usually understandable, a miskey with Steno is more jarring like an autocorrect substitution. And you can see slow parts, e.g. where they write numbers like 225, the farther you deviate from prose the harder it gets to go fast - and I do tend to write names of programs, names of servers, IP addresses, customer company name abbreviations, made up words and spellings for emphasis (like "customer says yoooooouuuuuuuuu broke it"), project and software and product and vendor names, and etc. AFAIK, a lot of the real speed boosts come from adding custom short briefs for long words you write a lot - e.g. specialising in legal, medical, or technical subjects and adding shortcuts for those, which you can potentially do with snippets and hotkeys to help normal typing overall. And of course, two full hands, a custom keyboard, and custom software.

That's not to say I don't like it, or don't respect it, or don't think it's faster, but it is more nuanced than simply being "learn it and write at least twice as fast". Mark Kislingbury is world class good, it is literally his job and his career and his record is 360 wpm. If everything you typed took you 1/3rd of the time, how much would that change your life? George R. R. Martin surely isn't holding off the last books of Game of Thrones because of typing speed. Typing speed probably isn't the limit of how many emails you can get through in your inbox, or how long you spend in meetings, or how clearly you can write documentation, or etc. I suggest if not using it as a career transcriber, considering it as hobby, or procrastination like people overly focused on their note taking systems instead of what the notes were supposed to be helping with. Almost every book or document or program ever written was written on qwerty or typewriter or pen and paper, and got on fine with it; good enough is good enough.

On another side of it, like the quote "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.", life and office life is overburdened by prose, it's already too easy to write paragraphs of guff that never gets to the point, who doesn't have an overflowing email inbox these days? Being able to churn it out faster possibly shouldn't be the goal - anyone wonder what it would be like if we all had to write like Stephen Hawking? Think as much as you like but turning it into text for someone else to read will cost you; making writers suffer, to make readers lives easier with less to read. Use a horrible painful keyboard, write less, your audience won't thank you because they won't be thinking of you, but good because the point should be to get out of their way not to take their attention for as long as you can.

(Author, condense thyself; yes I should)