He's not talking about fast typing. He is saying that is a big effort for his students to try out an idea because they have to struggle to find the correct syntax and keywords to express it.
Also that they refuse to experiment by trying out ideas which may or may not work. Instead, they bang their heads and don't type a lick until they have found what they regard as "the" solution. Which is often not even "a" solution, but because they haven't been coding their ideas as they go, they have no way of finding that out until they slowly and painfully implement their idea and it doesn't work.
I have to disagree. I would say that anything that helps get to a testable solution faster helps make one a better coder. This could be by saving time having to look up syntax, but it could also literally be just typing twice as fast as somebody and being able to iterate through solutions twice as fast as the next guy.
