On 11 Nov 2019, at 17:05, Richard Damon <Richard@damon-family.org> wrote:
On 11/11/19 10:10 AM, Random832 wrote:
On Mon, Nov 11, 2019, at 03:22, Greg Ewing wrote: On 11/11/19, 12:41 PM, Richard Damon wrote:
it was DESIGNED to be inefficient (that was one of its design goals, to slow typesetters down to be slower than the machine they were working on). This is most likely a myth, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY This is a nice rhetorical trick: "Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down,[5] but rather to speed up typing by preventing jams." - well *of course* the goal was not to slow down actual production of text, but this does not imply the method by which "speeding up by preventing jams" was to be achieved was not by slowing down the physical process of pressing keys. (And the argument that having keys on alternating hands speeds things up is related to modern touch-typing techniques, and has little to do with the environment in which QWERTY was originally designed).
Yes, Someone on the Internet is wrong! https://xkcd.com/386/
My memory of the full story is that, YES, putting come combinations verse putting them together let the machines go faster and perhaps let touch typist go faster, but then they often went a bit too fast even then so many of the common letters were moved from the home row or to weak fingers to slow the typist down a bit to match the machine. This was the impetus for the development of alternate keyboards, like the Dvorak, which were designed to be faster for a trained typist to use.
This gets to the key point of my comment, even though the Dvorak keyboard has been show to be superior to the standard QWERTY keyboard in a number of studies (like your claims that a symbolic notation is superior to 'ASCII Soup'), a major hindrance to it being adopted is the existing infrastructure.
And some studies have shown no or insignificant advantage and the original study was a fraud. I think we can safely let it go. It's way more important that there is a standard.