QWERTY was not designed to intentionally slow typists down (was: Unicode normalisation [was Re: [beginner] What's wrong?])

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 11:39 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> With QWERTY, the eight home keys only cover a fraction over a quarter of
> all key presses: ASDF JKL; have frequencies of
>
> 8.12% 6.28% 4.32% 2.30% 0.10% 0.69% 3.98% and effectively 0%
>
> making a total of 25.79%. If you also include G and H as "virtual
> home-keys", that rises to 33.74%.

Hey, that's a little unfair. Remember, lots of people still have to
write C code, so the semicolon is an important character! :) In fact,
skimming the CPython source code (grouped by file extension) shows
that C code has more semicolons than j's or k's:

a 3.19% s 3.26% d 1.90% f 1.76% g 0.95% h 0.89% j 0.36% k 0.35% l 2.62% ; 1.40%

for a total of 16.69% of characters coming from the home row.

ChrisA