4 ms·
It is reasonable to assume that anybody writing code is using the US keyboard layout. That is the de facto standard and standards are important. Anybody who de
by mantap 6y ago
It is reasonable to assume that anybody writing code is using the US keyboard layout. That is the de facto standard and standards are important.
Anybody who deviates from that is doing so at their own risk. If you want to use Dvorak or Azerty instead of Qwerty then you can do that, it's just not advisable because things like Vim will no longer make sense.
If you try to write code using a layout that doesn't have all the ascii printable symbol characters in accessible locations then you're creating a special kind of hell for yourself. It takes like 30 seconds to change to US layout.
- dgellow 6y ago> It is reasonable to assume that anybody writing code is using the US keyboard layout. That is the de facto standard and standards are important. That’s not reasonable at all. You have way more people writing code outside of the US than within. The US layout may be the most represented one, I don’t know statistics on this, but I would expect it to be on the losing side when comparing US layout vs non-US layout. Though I would agree that having access to ASCII is something you need, but any standardized keyboard layout in the world can do that via modifiers, if not directly.
- setr 6y agoIts reasonable in the sense that the decision was already made, by history & circumstance, and that it's largely not that problematic and well supported (out of necessity). The only alternatives would be to converge on a lowest common demoninator, and have a likely more inconvenient syntax for all parties, or to diverge into regional-specific dialects, which unicode shows to be.. wide.. and generally make code sharing much harder. This is really more of a "many mostly equivalent solutions, but one needs to be picked" scenario -- and it would be time poorly spent trying to undo the incumbent solution (and will naturally be rendered untenable by endless bike-shedding anyways). The worst of all solutions -- except for all the others
- YawningAngel 6y agoLots of non-US based programmers use a US layout anyway though, so I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption in the context of English language programming
- _ph_ 6y agoNo, it is not reasonable. While, as you can see, I am fine using English, I have to use a German keyboard layout because otherwise I would lose the ability to type my native language.
- account42 6y agoThere is nothing preventing you from swtiching layouts between coding and typing German.
- _ph_ 6y agoYes, there is: I am a touch-typist. So the layout of the keyboard is wired into my muscle-memory. Trying to switch layouts wrecks havoc with that. I tried it for a while, when I had to use an English layout at work, and it was very detrimental to my typing abilities. So I had to decide on one layout, and my native tongue won. As you see, I can type English text quite fine, just the brackets are more painful to type than parens.
- account42 6y agoHow long did you try? Of course learning to touch type on a different layout will take some time but that doesn't make using brackets in programming languages unreasonable. Using a German layout is very much a choice you have made and is no reason for you to demand that programming languages should make everyone else's life harder to acomodate those choices. Even for German text input, umlauts and sz are rare enough that it is not much of a hindrance to have to enter those via dead keys or compose sequences on a layout that doesn't make {} and [] a pain to type.
- IceDane 6y agoI don't think that's reasonable to think at all. Literally no one I know locally that is also a programmer uses the American layout. The difficulties of inputting symbols with ex. altgr is overstated. I really don't think most people use the American layout. That's just typical america-centric narcissism.