Reminds me of a C++ codebase I once had to inspect that was entirely written as if it were written in Java. With camelcase naming for everything, getters and setters for every class variable, interfaces everywhere.
Before he wrote the Bourne shell the author wrote an ALGOL compiler, and ALGOL inspired Bourne syntax:
I think in Europe C was not as common as other languages at the time so the terseness looked odd.
Characters like []{}\|~ are behind multi-finger access and often not printed at all on the physical keys (at least in the past). You can see how this adds a hurdle to writing C…
Pascal was designed by a European, so he preferred keywords which could be typed on every international keyboard. C basically just used every symbol from 7-bit ASCII that happened to be on the keyboards in Bell Labs.
You get used to them, though you start feeling like a pianist after a short coding session. The one most annoying for me are the fancy javascript/typescript quotes, which I have to use all too often: ` - altgr+7.
setxkbmap us -option ctrl:swapcaps -option compose:rwin
For starters, that they’re on Linux, they feel comfortable running complex CLI commands, they can memorize the U.S. layout just like that, and that they can type without looking at the physical keys (because changing the virtual mapping means keys produce something else than what the label says).
In reality, the learner’s first exposure to C family languages is more likely to be a website where you can run some JavaScript in a text box. And the first hurdle is to figure out how to even type {}. American developers just completely forget about that.
It's looks like being deliberately designed for press/office usage and not for proper programming.
The AltGr brackets are fine. The truly annoying character to type is the backtick (which is a quite new addition to the pantheon of special characters, C doesn’t use it).
My personal opinion is that Niklaus Wirth had the better overall ideas about clarity and inclusiveness in programming language design, but that battle is long lost. (What you consider the character set needed for "proper programming" is really a relatively new development, mid-1990s and later.)
My intuition is that Perl would be the most challenging on a keyboard where it's harder to type unusual punctuation, since it feels like a very punctuation-heavy language, but I don't know whether it actually uses more than C (I think the backtick has a shell-style meaning in Perl too).
Well unless opting for something like Dvorak, you are indeed doomed to something that was specificcaly designed to please typewriter mechanical constraints without much care for the resulting ergonomics.
I use a Bépo layout personally, on a Typematrix 2030 most of the time, as French is my native language.
In addition, our layout, overwrites only the numerics – all other symbols are the same as on a US layout.
Also practically everytime I need to write a comment, commit message or email I need my č, š and ž. It's kinda nice to have them only a single keypress away.
This is not far off from the guidelines in many cases, e.g. Windows code (well, not every variable of course.) A lot of Java design was copied from C++.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/cpp/property-cpp?view=...