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Comment by andrewljohnson | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think laziness (in this comment or the ones about the bash-like C macros) is the right word.

I guess there is some pressure/tiredness/newness/taste/external factors driving the choices, test count, and style guide aberrations.

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Probably typing on a non english keyboard. When I learned C a long time ago, I read somewhere 'isnt it nice that one doesnt need a lot of keystrokes like for begin and end', and I thought pls give me begin and end instead of this unpleasent slow hand movement.

Spot on. It's the reason many non-native speaker developers I know nevertheless use an English keyboard layout. I personally made my own hybrid layout that is basically an English US layout with the letters rearranged according to my native layout.

The author was born and raised in Brooklyn and went to Cornell, if I remember correctly. As far as I know, English was his only language, and he was almost certainly using either US QWERTY or Dvorak keyboard layout.

In that case it is bizarr.

> I thought pls give me begin and end instead of this unpleasent slow hand movement

Have you tried trigraphs? (/me ducks.)

Yes, "laziness" is unfair and imprecise, a laziness on my part. :(

I think it was an issue of familiarity and comfort, not newness. The author joined Google before I did. If you're basically working with one other person, and you're rarely getting code reviews from outside your coding pair, and few other people interact with your code, it's easy to develop some bad habits and forget that your code choices have externalities. To be fair, the externalities were usually rather small.

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