The title would probably be confusing, but I could not make it better than this. I noticed that most programming languages are limited to the alphanumerical set along with the special characters present in a general keyboard. I wondered if this posed a barrier for developers on what characters they were limited to program in, or if it was intentional from the start that these keys would be the most optimal characters for a program to be coded in by a human and was later adopted as a standard for every user. Basically, are the modern keyboards built around programming languages or are programming languages built around these keyboards?

  • fubo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The point wasn’t to slow down typists, but to reduce the number of bigrams (two-letter sequences) that would be typed with adjacent keys, since that’s the specific movement that’s most likely to cause the key levers to jam.

    • preciouspupp@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Not true. The current layout is the result of years of evolution based on feedback by typists and vendors.