I honestly don’t get why the heck we use this stupid layout… please somebody help me understand.
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Why do we still speak English? It has tons of flaws and inconsistencies. If enough people keep on doing the same thing for hundreds of years people will potentially do it forever.
We can’t switch over to the metric system. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if they tried to change keyboards.
FYI the reason I’m even asking this question is because my 7 year old son is learning to type and that’s what he asked me. I really didn’t have an answer other then “that’s just the way it is” so that’s why I’m asking all of you.
As others have said, it would be a pain to change. But another thing to understand is that the other options aren’t meaningfully better. Yes, there are “more efficient” or “more sensible” layouts, but when it comes down to it they’re not demonstrably easier to learn nor faster.
I resisted learning to touch type on a QWERTY keyboard initially… “It doesn’t make sense! There are better alternatives!” but eventually I needed to touch type for a job and so I forced myself to learn. Once I got past about 30 WPM (maybe after a couple months?) I never looked back. It’s been 20 years and I can do about 70 WPM now, and honestly it’s my brain that’s the limiting factor.
As a programmer, I learned to optimize programs by looking for bottlenecks. QWERTY is not the bottleneck in computer input.
The thing about Qwerty is it’s not a bad layout.
The idea that it was designed to slow typing down is a myth, really it was designed to give a good mix of left and right hand use, which keeps typewriter letter hits further away from each other and reduces jams but is also *good* for typing speed.
If you look at speed typing in other newer keyboard layouts the records are only a little faster than Qwerty.
So in Qwerty we have a layout that, sure, is old. But is fairly good for typing speed, is something everyone already knows, and especially for computer usage now has a load of important shortcut keys designed around their position such as Ctrl-Z/X/C/V all being next to each other that might be all over the place on a different layout.
Why is this a stupid layout and what’s better?
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