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For a time, I was working on gathering some good data on keyboard layouts. I wanted to work out which keys were commonly available, which weren't, and so on. I wanted to work out which characters were the most "i18n-friendly" for developers worldwide.

One day, I happened to take a programming class in Brazil. I noticed that a lot of students were simply switching their keyboard layout to US English in order to write code. I ditched that project.

That's a shame. I think your project still has a lot of value, even if the results are used more for software that's end-user focussed.

Still a bit weird if you type on keys that actually mean something else. Especially german keyboards are not designed to code with (for instance \ required three key strokes on a Mac keyboard, [ and ] are also pretty hard to reach...)

After a year of coding on a German kezboard (sic) set to US eng I finally bought little stickers and relabeled the []{}<>#_| keys. So much better not to have the cognitive friction anymore.

This, and learning to touch type helped a lot. And on top of that all kind of shortcuts different programs use become more logic, such as the [-key for changing the brush size in Photoshop, cmd+[ for indenting in textmate...