6 ms·
Why is the 0 next to 9, not next to 1?
- petermcneeley 6y agoThe better question is why is 0 next to O. How many programming bugs have resulted in 0 and O being so close together on the keyboard.
- yakubin 6y agoProbably 0. :) How often do you see a variable named "O"?
- JadeNB 6y agoIt is a real optimist who thinks that the obviously wrong thing to do in code has never been done, or even that it's not the most commonly done thing.
- techbio 6y ago"To tell them apart", a former coworker used the variables named: style1 stylei stylel Ironically, they were still there for some time after I'd left.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI'm reminded of the brilliant How To Write Unmaintainable Code. https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code
- rvieira 6y agoI think you meant "probably O"
- simonblack 6y agoMany times I notice that I have written a hex number as 'ox1234' instead of '0x1234'. I wonder if that is a subconscious thing as I tend to call '0' as 'oh' rather than 'zero'. (I grew up calling the '0' in phone numbers as 'oh', along with the rest of my cultural peers.)
- hulitu 6y ago> Many times I notice that I have written a hex number as 'ox1234' instead of '0x1234'. On old fonts 0 was ∅ (well not this letter but with a line like in this example) so it was easy to spot it. But we are living on a planet that's revolving and evolving ...
- GekkePrutser 6y agoUgh yeah as an IT person that kind of mistake always bugs me. At my last job someone had labelled all the lockers with "0rder management". It bugged me so much every time I looked at it. For me this is immediately obvious. I don't think the closeness of the two keys have much to do with this error though.
- tinus_hn 6y agoThe original design didn’t have a 1, the l was enough for both. Perhaps the 0 was added as an afterthought as well, after all you could just use the O.
- tremon 6y agoThe 0 key I use the most on my keyboard is next to 1 and 2, and farthest from the 9 key. I wonder if that has grown naturally to me because of tohster's explanation in his reply: Benford's law shows that the lower digits are much more frequently used than higher digits [..] If the 0 key were next to the 1 key, many numbers would be faster to type with just one hand It's for this reason that dedicated numerical keypads place the 0, 1, 2 and 3 keys in close proximity: users can rest their fingers on these most-frequently-used digits and enter data more quickly.
- orev 6y agoI appreciate seeing the history of keyboard evolution, and I can see those points as being valid. However, it cannot be overlooked that the simple fact is people start counting with the number “1”, so it’s perfectly reasonable that that’s why the first digit is “1” (and why zero-indexed arrays cause so many off by one errors). And the 0 at the end is the logical place for 0 as a stand-in for “10”, since in normal counting you wouldn’t need a 0 until you go past 9, onward to 10. I appreciate that things like Benford’s law exist, but I don’t really buy into the idea that people put that much thought into it, when the more obvious answer is simply: “the first number is 1”. QWERTY wasn’t designed because of some deep academic analysis of typing patterns — it was just to spread out frequently used letters so the mechanical arms didn’t get jammed. It’s nice to think that all the standards we have today are a result of some deep thought, A/B testing, and a full committee review and approval of the design, but in reality it’s most often just what happened to work “well enough” at the time (evolution instead of intelligent design).
- scrollaway 6y ago> when the more obvious answer is simply: “the first number is 1”. This doesn't really hold if you see that 0 was to the right of 9 when the first number was 2, not 1.
- Ansil849 6y ago> since in normal counting you wouldn’t need a 0 until you go past 9, onward to 10. You absolutely could need a 0 before you got to 10. 1.01, etc. Unless you're saying decimals aren't "normal".
- heinrich5991 6y agoCounting is usually done with natural numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting.
- Ansil849 6y agoThe Wikipedia link does not back-up your claim in the slightest. On the contrary, it states: > The traditional way of counting consists of continually increasing a (mental or spoken) counter by a unit for every element of the set
- NemuriBaku 6y agoThis reminds me of the issue of clocks starting at 12 instead of 0.
- addicted 6y agoHow is that an issue? There is no 0 AM or PM. There is 12 AM and PM, however.
- pjerem 6y agoThat’s a (not so big) « issue » since it’s a written convention which comes from clocks layout. Even while using the same physical layout, lots of countries count time from 00:00 to 23:59 (without notion of AM/PM). In France we always use 24h format when writing and usually when speaking. But some people uses the same conventions as US, only when speaking by saying « 3 heures de l’après midi » which stands for « 3 hours in the afternoon ». It tends to disappear however for « 15 heures ». Exceptions are we likely never say 00:00 or 12:00 but « Minuit » and « midi ».
- NemuriBaku 6y agoSome people are thrown off when the time goes 10AM, 11AM, 12PM, 1PM. The "12" is used more like a 0. So 0 hours and 30 minutes post meridian is 12:30PM.
- tpoacher 6y agoAh yes. The Zero based vs One based indexing systems debate. Again. This time on keyboards.