[erlang-questions] OT: typing distance

[jm]

Adam Lindberg wrote:
> I use a close to American Dvorak layout, where brackets are on the two
> keys after 0. While this is not that close to the home row comparing to
> their usage frequency, it's a lot more convenient than having them as in
> the Swedish Dvorak / qwerty layout, spread out over the number row. With
> my current one there's less jumping around. Also, I have slash (/) on a
> single hit key (instead of Shift + 7), which is convenient in a web /
> terminal environment. All in all, it's a slightly better layout for
> programming than the standard Swedish one (Dvorak). Qwerty is long since
> gone for me. ;-)
> 

Reminds me of when I got an appliance from Sweden a few years ago. The
keyboard map was still set to Swedish Qwerty. It was a nightmare trying
to use a US Qwerty (sholes) keyboard as quite a few of the important
puntuation characters were in a different location. It was a bit of a
luck dig with the back space being used a fair bit until we managed to
work out how to change the keyboard map.

There is a bit written about how terse or verbose code for a particular
problem is (eg http://storytotell.org/articles/2006/11/16/code-kata-11
). Perhaps typing effort should be added to the list of metrics to
consider in language design.


Jeff.