The beauty of the ampersand and other keyboard symbols | Hacker News Reader

The beauty of the ampersand and other keyboard symbols

spectator.co.uk

16 pointsprismatic13 comments

Hah, a passage about an historic gun duel over the use of a punctuation mark, and yet the author refers to the # glyph as "hashtag" with no irony whatsoever :(

pound, sharp, hash, even octothorpe predate “hashtag”.

One would think that the multitude of already established terms for this symbol would, if anything, vindicate the use of the term "hashtag". It demonstrates that there is already a historical precedent for contextual consideration when naming the # symbol.

#tag is a hash, followed by a tag, together constituting a hashtag: lit. A tag denoted (in a snippet of plain text) by its preceding hash symbol :)

# alone lacks the tag to make it a hashtag...

hash -> hashtag hardly seems like a meaningful change

Why do the special symbols go in different places on different language keyboards? Makes little sense to me. You'd think most of the keys on a keyboard would be more or less the same place, with a few differences. Sticking to Latin based of course. But for instance the @ is in widely different places between languages. I mean I could understand if it was a language specific character like those Spanish upside down ones. But for the others, why aren't they more or less in the same place?

Obviously historical reasons due to how typewriters in those countries were once organized.

Keyboard layouts seldom seem to be particularly thought out, and the strange position of keys today is due to the historical reason of how the mechanical implementation of typewriters worked.

The world is filled with rather unbecoming design choices, simply in service of inertia.

That just pushes back the question though. If you're importing the first typewriter from say Germany to the UK, wouldn't you make minimal changes?

How it actually went historically is that different brands had completely different layouts until some sort of standardization emerged within particular locations.

It is not as though one country had a standardized layout before other countries started manufacturing typewriters.

> the interrobang...a cross between an exclamation mark and a question mark...we’re told it’s still used in computer programming

Is it?

I've never seen it used in a programming language, given that non-ascii characters are uncommon and so is ‽ specifically. Maybe they got it confused with a hashbang/shebang (#!)?

    // what the fuck‽

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