Quote:
Originally Posted by pjt33
As a result, ISTR Dvorak being awful for programming (at least in C-family languages - probably not so bad for Pascal and SQL).
|
One might rephrase this to say, as a result Dvorak is not designed to be efficient for programming. This is very true as you point out. But that doesn't mean it's less efficient than Qwerty for those languages, either. However, there are special Dvorak layouts meant for programming.
In addition, there is a great deal of English involved in most programming languages (function names, system variables, etc) for which Dvorak is undoubtedly more efficient than Qwerty. Then there's documentation, reports, communication between team members, etc -- all parts of programming which use natural language and thus are improved by Dvorak (assuming of course English is the language used for said pieces of information).
I have never felt any problem with having to reach a little extra distance for my curly braces while programming. I would find that the annoyances of having to use a separate layout for programming as compared to natural language would outweigh the convenience of a slight increase in efficiency in either case. For those who don't agree with me on this count there are other layouts specifically designed for programming (both Dvorak and Qwerty based).