Problems of Symbol Congestion in Computer Languages

[Xah Lee]

On Feb 28, 7:30 pm, rusi <rustompm... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 28, 11:39 pm, Dotan Cohen <dotanco... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > You miss the canonical bad character reuse case: = vs ==.
>
> > Had there been more meta keys, it might be nice to have a symbol for
> > each key on the keyboard. I personally have experimented with putting
> > the symbols as regular keys and the numbers as the Shifted versions.
> > It's great for programming.
>
> Hmmm... Clever!
> Is it X or Windows?
> Can I have your setup?

hi Russ,

there's a programer's dvorak layout i think is bundled with linux.

or you can do it with xmodmap on X-11 or AutoHotKey on Windows, or
within emacs... On the mac, you can use keyboardMaestro, Quickeys, or
just write a os wide config file yourself. You can see tutorials and
sample files for all these here http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/keyboarding.html

i'd be interested to know what Dotan Cohen use too.

i tried the swapping number row with symbols a few years back. didn't
like it so much because numbers are frequently used as well,
especially when you need to enter a series of numbers. e.g. heavy
math, or dates 2010-02-28. One can use the number pad but i use that
as extra programable buttons.

 Xah

> One problem we programmers face is that keyboards were made for
> typists not programmers.
> Another is that when we move from 'hi-level' questions eg code reuse
> -- to lower and lower -- eg ergonomics of reading and writing code --
> the focus goes from the center of consciousness to the periphery and
> we miss how many inefficiencies there are in our semi-automatic
> actions.