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Oh nice, an article about my native language on HN's front page. Currently living in Germany I actually find our approach to special characters really elegant.
by odiroot 12y ago
Oh nice, an article about my native language on HN's front page.
Currently living in Germany I actually find our approach to special characters really elegant. I was surprised how much different are German (and French) keyboards.
I wonder whether these different layouts can affect for example your programming prowess.
- kosma 12y agoIt definitely affects the learning curve. Have a look at the Czech keyboard layout; when I first started learning that language I ended up using the Compose key. Why on Earth would you put diacritics on numerical keys without any kind of logical mapping? At least Polish is 100% logical in this regard (except AltGr-X, but that was unavoidable). The Russian keyboard layout is similarly annoying as the keys are simply not where you expect them. On most systems you can install a phonetic keyboard driver and kinda roll with it - that is, until you have to use a real Russian keyboard, at which point you have to re-learn from scratch. Oh, and don't get me started on AZERTY and QWERTZ. What were they thinking?! The point is that on some layouts you can start typing right away; on other, you have to jump through hoops and get frustrated. Not that we can do anything about it now. Historical reasons.
- expertentipp 12y agoI find the polish programmer layout very intuitive. National layouts for languages using latin alphabet are often failed customizations of design already not optimal and nightmare for foreigner. Italian - need tilde character? sorry. German - dedicated key for each umlaut and brackets cluttered under 7 - 0. French - AZERTY? really?