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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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yeah you are right
He's not completely, though. @marcos had it right about co-evolution -- leaving aside any issues of internationalization, the layout of letters came from typewriters, but the layout of punctuation available was different on different computers for a lot of the early history of programming. Some of the more extreme examples were the Space Cadet Keyboard used at MIT, and APL which more or less required you to use an APL-specific keyboard in order to be able to access all the special symbols that are part of APL. Here's an APL program:
Things became much more standardized when the IBM PC's keyboard became the norm, and were formalized in 1995 with ISO 9995. Then once it stabilized there was a strong incentive for both language designers and keyboard makers to stick with what everyone was used to so they could keep working with the other. But it wasn't always that way.
Edit: Here's what things looked like on an IBM 3276:
(Full size image)
Fun fact: the standard qwerty layout was made to slow typewriter typing down by putting common keys off the home row and apart from each other. This was done to prevent the little key arm thingies from colliding and jamming when typing quickly.
EDIT: Apparently this is not a fact
The point wasn't to slow down typists, but to reduce the number of bigrams (two-letter sequences) that would be typed with adjacent keys, since that's the specific movement that's most likely to cause the key levers to jam.
Not true. The current layout is the result of years of evolution based on feedback by typists and vendors.
That's a popular urban legend, but also disputed.
https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/139379/1/42_161.pdf