Japanese is actually not the best example of "bracket pain" - in order to type in Latin script at all, you need to shift completely away from "native" input, as

Japanese is actually not the best example of "bracket pain" - in order to type in Latin script at all, you need to shift completely away from "native" input, as the various methods for typing kanji and kana tend to be some variant of lookup (via eg pronunciation) - select (like tab completing identifiers). Thus, it makes a lot of sense to simply switch input modes and maybe even keyboard layouts. Now, for something as close to English as Norwegian - you have a rather different touch layout due to having 29 letters. This is actually one reason I like python - less gymnastics due to less curly brackets. Another problem with using ascii, is that now even code comments need to be in English character set in practice. Never mind function names etc. Utf-8 by default is actually great in the programming languages that support it. Don't mistake "have been tolerating absurd limitations of C" with "greatly enjoying the backward limitations of ASCII".