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I for one would make no design decisions at all taking French AZERTY as a consideration. As a Frenchman I feel I can say it's the world's most badly designed ke

by elros 10y ago

I for one would make no design decisions at all taking French AZERTY as a consideration. As a Frenchman I feel I can say it's the world's most badly designed keyboard that's used in a major language. I would truly like to know its origins and how it got so bad, cause I have no idea. Only two of my main gripes: How come there's a whole key dedicated to superscript 2 and superscript 3? How many times a year does one use the key that's dedicated to the Greek letter Mu and the £ sign? If we're lacking a key for `, howbout we change the ù key into it, given ù is used only in a single word in the whole language?

ronjouch 10y ago
> "As a Frenchman I feel I can say it's the world's most badly designed keyboard that's used in a major language. I would truly like to know its origins and how it got so bad, cause I have no idea." I agree the AZERTY layout sucks. But it's not alone in its messiness, even QWERTY's (un-) design continues to raise questions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#History > "I for one would make no design decisions at all taking French AZERTY as a consideration." Let me expand that statement: you are a craftsman who refuses to adjust his product to a piece of infrastructure that will at worst never budge, at best evolve conservatively and regardless of what you think, hurting your users/customers and bringing you nothing but some pride of not stepping over a self-imposed line in the sand. Don't you think that's unrealistic and a bit sad? Have you seen many US roadsign makers refuse to build mph signs and print km/h signs instead because metric is better than imperial?
- elros 10y ago
  I think that's a false equivalency. The cost for people on AZERTY to just get a nice QWERTY layout, individually, is very small, and can be implemented on a personal level. Units of measure have to be, more often than not, coördinated among multiple people, which increases the costs of migrating between them, making it less favorable. I'd be a craftsman refusing to adjust my product in a way that benefits an extremely small subset of my users (people on a French keyboard) and worsens the experience of a major subset of my target audience (people on a keyboard with ` that have prior experience with this syntax). Let's put it this way: If a programming language required the letter ù in its syntax, which being present on a French keyboard but not on most others, represents the inverse of the current situation, my advice would be different.

by elros 10y ago

ronjouch 10y ago

> "As a Frenchman I feel I can say it's the world's most badly designed keyboard that's used in a major language. I would truly like to know its origins and how it got so bad, cause I have no idea." I agree the AZERTY layout sucks. But it's not alone in its messiness, even QWERTY's (un-) design continues to raise questions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#History > "I for one would make no design decisions at all taking French AZERTY as a consideration." Let me expand that statement: you are a craftsman who refuses to adjust his product to a piece of infrastructure that will at worst never budge, at best evolve conservatively and regardless of what you think, hurting your users/customers and bringing you nothing but some pride of not stepping over a self-imposed line in the sand. Don't you think that's unrealistic and a bit sad? Have you seen many US roadsign makers refuse to build mph signs and print km/h signs instead because metric is better than imperial?

elros 10y ago
I think that's a false equivalency. The cost for people on AZERTY to just get a nice QWERTY layout, individually, is very small, and can be implemented on a personal level. Units of measure have to be, more often than not, coördinated among multiple people, which increases the costs of migrating between them, making it less favorable. I'd be a craftsman refusing to adjust my product in a way that benefits an extremely small subset of my users (people on a French keyboard) and worsens the experience of a major subset of my target audience (people on a keyboard with ` that have prior experience with this syntax). Let's put it this way: If a programming language required the letter ù in its syntax, which being present on a French keyboard but not on most others, represents the inverse of the current situation, my advice would be different.