The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard

Amusing juxtaposition:

"More recent research has debunked any claims that Dvorak is more efficient, but it hardly matters. Even in 1930 it was already too late for a new system to gain a foothold."

The text "recent research" points to the Reason article that very few people seem to realise is written by free market fundamentalist economists and not ergonomic historians. These economists believe that there is no such thing as lock-in. According to their theories the market always chooses the best tech. Which means any tech not chosen by the market must be worse than whatever wins.

Yet he contradicts their dogma in the very next sentence after citing them, with the common sense view that entrenched tech can be worse than the alternatives if it gets there first.

The truth doesn't matter anymore. The meme that "QWERTY was designed to be inefficient, caught on, and now we're stuck with it" has mythical emotive power, much like "women were worshipped for their mysterious ability to give birth, before agriculture gave us the patriarchy", so much so that Alan Kay still uses "a QWERTY keyboard situation" to describe "network effects of something designed to suck"; and layout hipsters will be touting the superiority of their Dvořák layouts long after the time_t-pocalypse twenty-five years hence.

It's not about the layout of the keys when coding in perl it's how soft they are for when you roll your face on it.