On 11/11/19 10:10 AM, Random832 wrote: > On Mon, Nov 11, 2019, at 03:22, Greg Ewing wrote: >> On 11/11/19, 12:41 PM, Richard Damon wrote: >>> it was DESIGNED to be inefficient (that was one of its design goals, to >>> slow typesetters down to be slower than the machine they were working >>> on). >> This is most likely a myth, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY > This is a nice rhetorical trick: "Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY > layout was not designed to slow the typist down,[5] but rather to speed up > typing by preventing jams." - well *of course* the goal was not to slow down > actual production of text, but this does not imply the method by which > "speeding up by preventing jams" was to be achieved was not by slowing down > the physical process of pressing keys. (And the argument that having keys on > alternating hands speeds things up is related to modern touch-typing > techniques, and has little to do with the environment in which QWERTY was > originally designed).
Yes, Someone on the Internet is wrong! https://xkcd.com/386/ My memory of the full story is that, YES, putting come combinations verse putting them together let the machines go faster and perhaps let touch typist go faster, but then they often went a bit too fast even then so many of the common letters were moved from the home row or to weak fingers to slow the typist down a bit to match the machine. This was the impetus for the development of alternate keyboards, like the Dvorak, which were designed to be faster for a trained typist to use. This gets to the key point of my comment, even though the Dvorak keyboard has been show to be superior to the standard QWERTY keyboard in a number of studies (like your claims that a symbolic notation is superior to 'ASCII Soup'), a major hindrance to it being adopted is the existing infrastructure. If for some reason, every keyboard in the world was destroyed, every driver disappeared, and everyone forgot all their training on keyboard use, the replacement keyboard might well be something like the Dvorak keyboard, but that isn't going to happen. In the same way, perhaps a graphical based language might be the choice if all programming languages and tools disappeared and had to be built up fresh (but on a system reboot like that, simplicity would be important). Due to the infrastructure situation, I don't see an existing language making the jump from being 'ASCII' based to graphics based suddenly. One option is to develop and environment for programming that is 'graphical' in its entry and display, with the actual program file still the classical ASCII language, so it still interfaces with the existing tools. As that tool demonstrates improvements in programmer productivity, it would gather more users, and perhaps create the demand for such an environment be considered 'normal' and thus the language able to make moves based on that. The other option is to create a new language, perhaps based on an existing language, based on the new graphical idea. Being a fresh start, it won't be held back by existing infrastructure in its design, just in its availability. Such a language would need to build it following based on its merits, including that it use makes much of the existing tools hard to use with it. -- Richard Damon _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/OPROGFDV4EK77RATNYAZBDD7MXQBG3F7/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
