Ergonomics (was Re: Question mark in variable and function names

[Carlos Ribeiro]

On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 00:53:35 -0700, Cliff Wells
<clifford.wells at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 10:19 +0300, Ville Vainio wrote:
> > >>>>> "Cliff" == Cliff Wells <clifford.wells at comcast.net> writes:
> >
> >     Cliff> On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 12:08 +0300, Ville Vainio wrote:
> >
> >     >> Incidentally, I've remapped my keyboard so that ( and ) don't
> >     >> require pressing shift.
> >
> >     Cliff> *smacks forehead and cries*
> >
> > Why? Ergonomics is a matter that is taken into account way too rarely,
> > just observe how frequently programmers complain about RSI these
> > days. Python is pretty ergonomic for the most part (not too much
> > punctuation, popular habit of preferring lowercase letters) but it's
> > often a good idea to go for a little extra edge :).
> 
> I'm crying because I've been hitting shift 8000 times a day for 20 years
> when such a simple solution was right in front of my face :P

Totally off topic -- if you were to design a new keyboard, where do
you would put the parenthesis? After reading that I was wondering
about what is the best choice:

1) put each parenthesis on one side of the keyboard (open in the left
hand, close in the right hand);

2) keep both parenthesis on the right side of the keyboard, where
there are a few spare keys, _including_ the ones for square brackets
and regular brackets (I have a brazilian ABNT-2 keyboard);

3) design a new block of keys, similar to the (Insert/Delete,
Home/End, PgUp/PgDn) block, with quick punctuation symbols --
parenthesis, brackets, square brackets, angle brackets, slashes
(forward and back), hyphen+underline, and similar pairings. A vertical
block of keys, with two columns, five rows -- it's enough for most
pairings without a shift key.

_If_ I was to design my own keyboard, I would probably keep it Qwerty
(already used to it, and also, changing it makes difficult to use
anything else); but I would probably implement option (3) for
frequently used symbols.

-- 
Carlos Ribeiro
Consultoria em Projetos
blog: http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com
blog: http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com
mail: carribeiro at gmail.com
mail: carribeiro at yahoo.com