Keyboard Layout: Dvorak vs Colemak: is it Worthwhile to Improve the Dvorak Layout?

[Elena]

On 13 Giu, 15:19, Steven D'Aprano <steve
+comp.lang.pyt... at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:21:53 -0700, Elena wrote:
> > On 13 Giu, 06:30, Tim Roberts <t... at probo.com> wrote:
> >> Studies have shown that even a
> >> strictly alphabetical layout works perfectly well, once the typist is
> >> acclimated.
>
> > Once the user is acclimated to move her hands much  more (about 40% more
> > for Qwerty versus Dvorak), that is.
>
> The actual physical cost of typing is a small part of coding.
> Productivity-wise, optimizing the distance your hands move is worthwhile
> for typists who do nothing but type, e.g. if you spend their day
> mechanically copying text or doing data entry, then increasing your
> typing speed from 30 words per minute (the average for untrained computer
> users) to 90 wpm (the average for typists) means your productivity
> increases by 200% (three times more work done).
>
> I don't know if there are any studies that indicate how much of a
> programmer's work is actual mechanical typing but I'd be surprised if it
> were as much as 20% of the work day. The rest of the time being thinking,
> planning, debugging, communicating with customers or managers, reading
> documentation, testing, committing code, sketching data schemas on the
> whiteboard ... to say nothing of the dreaded strategy meetings.
>
> And even in that 20% of the time when you are actively typing code,
> you're not merely transcribing written text but writing new code, and
> active composition is well known to slow down typing speed compared to
> transcribing. You might hit 90 wpm in the typing test, but when writing
> code you're probably typing at 50 wpm with the occasional full speed
> burst.
>
> So going from a top speed (measured when transcribing text) of 30 wpm to
> 90 wpm sounds good on your CV, but in practice the difference in
> productivity is probably tiny. Oh, and if typing faster just means you
> make more typos in less time, then the productivity increase is
> *negative*.
>
> Keyboard optimizations, I believe, are almost certainly a conceit. If
> they really were that good an optimization, they would be used when
> typing speed is a premium. The difference between an average data entry
> operator at 90 wpm and a fast one at 150 wpm is worth real money. If
> Dvorak and other optimized keyboards were really that much better, they
> would be in far more common use. Where speed really is vital, such as for
> court stenographers, special mechanical shorthand machines such as
> stenotypes are used, costing thousands of dollars but allowing the typist
> to reach speeds of over 300 wpm.
>
> Even if we accept that Dvorak is an optimization, it's a micro-
> optimization. And like most optimizations, there is a very real risk that
> it is actually a pessimation: if it takes you three months to get back up
> to speed on a new keyboard layout, you potentially may never make back
> that lost time in your entire programming career.
>
> --
> Steven

I don't buy into this.  For one, could you possibly lose so much time
while learning a new layout, time you won't recover in an entire
career, if entering text were such a little time consuming task of
yours?

In my experience, an inefficient layout would disrupt my flow of
thought whenever I would sit at the keyboard and type something.
That's the reason I use a Vim-like editor, as well.

Sure, better is worse, once you push beyond a certain limit, and
that's exactly what Xah was talking about.