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Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

daveperrett.com

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Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#11

Post by Jensson »

kleiba wrote: post #9
mrweasel wrote: post #6

The downsides aren't unique to Japanese keyboards. On Danish keyboard " requires the use of the shift key, same for = and the \ in on the 7 keys, along with /, requiring you to hit option + shift + 7 (on a mac keyboard, I believe it's Alt + shift + The Japanese keyboard in the article does have { printed on a key, it's Option + Shift + 8 and the Danish Mac keyboard, and the key isn't labels with {, } is on the 9.

As a decade long Emacs user, I can not follow: what's the problem with modifier keys?! Just kidding, I know that some people have a hard time typing them, especially when your day job consists of doing exactly that for eight hours.

> what's the problem with modifier keys?!

Lets say your keyboard requires modifier keys for a specific symbol, but your program treats that input differently depending on whether modifier keys are held or not. Or another bad one, lets say your keyboard requires multiple strokes for a specific symbol, for example backticks, and your language uses backticks as quotes...

So many language and programs designed with strange symbols and keyboard modifiers are close to unusable in other keyboard layouts.

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#13

Post by dylan604 »

deathanatos wrote: post #5
kleiba wrote: post #4

You can remap keys on any keyboard layout, no need to get a Japanese keyboard. Many years ago, I was working in a German lab and their keyboard layout is really impractical for programming in C-like languages because all commonly used symbols are really awkward to type. I wasn't well-versed in XFree86 then (or today for that matter) but I remember I could solve the problem by simply changing they map that Emacs uses…

Especially on keyboards with blank keycaps. :)

Now that's a blast from the past in typing class. I remember hearing people complaining about this or rather using it as a horror story about the class. Of course by the point in the class you use these, you've passed the point of being expected to know where the keys are and it is pretty much an advanced part of the class.

Not sure if that's your reference or not???

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#15

Post by red_hare »

> ALT-yen-mark to get a proper backslash

I believe this is an artifact of JIS_X0201, which is, to my knowledge, the first major Japanese 8-bit encoding and mostly 7-bit ASCII + Katakana (that character set you see in old Japanese video games) and some Japan-specific symbols filling the other half of the 8-bit space.

In it, byte 0x23 was changed from "\" to "¥".

The history is fascinating:

> The 1964 ISO draft reserved the positions 0x24 and 0x5c for first and second currency symbols to be assigned by each country, but it was considered too dangerous in international communications to use currency symbols that could be localized. The ISO committee had two options that to use a generic currency symbol (¤) or to give the dollar ($) and pound (£) signs permanent assignments. It was agreed that the dollar sign was assigned to position 0x24 and the pound sign was to position 0x23. The latter was not required in countries that did not need the pound sign. The JIS committee decided to put the yen sign (¥) in 0x5c (one of the national use positions).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0201

It's legacy lived on in Shift JIS which Window's extended and resulted in Japanese Windows computers having file paths like "C:¥Users¥MyName" and escape sequences like "¥n"

All this to say, my respect for Japanese devs who work with encoding is top-tier.

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#16

Post by dylan604 »

Maybe it's because I took an actual typing class way back in the dark days of actual clackity-clack type writers, but I don't get the dislike of shift keys. Are these people that learned to type from only playing games or other non-formalized learning to type? Kudos for you learning regardless of the method, I'm just looking at why I don't have the same aversion to the shift keys. I even use the "proper" shift key meaning I use the left shift when using a right hand key and vice-versa.

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#17

Post by wk_end »

dylan604 wrote: post #16

Maybe it's because I took an actual typing class way back in the dark days of actual clackity-clack type writers, but I don't get the dislike of shift keys. Are these people that learned to type from only playing games or other non-formalized learning to type? Kudos for you learning regardless of the method, I'm just looking at why I don't have the same aversion to the shift keys. I even use the "proper" shift key me…

I never learned to type "properly" and I also don't really care or think about modifier keys. I suspect it's one of those things - like coffee snobs searching for the perfect pourover technique, or steak snobs perfecting their reverse sear - wherein people take a hobby, passion, or profession of theirs and feel a need to hyperoptimize it.

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#19

Post by neilv »

10% of the remaining advantage of Scheme today is not needing to use the Shift key to type identifiers on US keyboards. Instead, you use minus rather than underscore, and there's no camel-case, and mostly no all-caps (except for syntax transformer pattern variables, IMHO).

However, Scheme and other Lisps have the problem of parentheses being a shifted character on most US keyboards.

For Scheme, my Emacs tweaks included letting you type the square brackets (unshifted on US keyboard) to get parentheses. (Or you'd get the correctly matching closing character, if the close-square-bracket key you pressed would match an open-square-bracket.)

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