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[theory]

By the way, how fast do you all type?  http://www.typeracer.com

[Grujah]

70ish.

Engish is not my native tongue, though, do I get extra points?

[theory]

Doesn't it have different language settings?

I usually average around 130.  All those piano lessons from childhood have really paid off.

[Grujah]

I'm actually slower in Serbian, manly because I suck at Euro-keyboard punctuation. 

[Davio]

By the way, how fast do you all type?  http://www.typeracer.com

Depends whether I use my laptop or an actual keyboard.

I'm very slow on my laptop, because it's so cramped.

[michaeljb]

I'm usually around 90. After I felt I could touch-type Dvorak, the first few one-minute tests I typed around 30, I think the best I got was 37.

The thing is, I'm also learning Emacs right now, and I think that is bad news for me learning Dvorak, since I'm learning all of Emacs's key bindings in Qwerty, and it's starting to become muscle memory more than thinking about which keys I'm pressing.

I don't mind doing the key bindings in Dvorak, but not being able to actually type text quickly makes it too frustrating to keep at it for very long, so naturally that leads to just getting more practice with the key bindings in Qwerty, and as I get more comfortable with Emacs+Qwerty, Dvorak seems less and less worth it. It's a vicious cycle

[Young Nick]

Doesn't it have different language settings?

I usually average around 130.  All those piano lessons from childhood have really paid off.

[Dulkal]

By the way, how fast do you all type?  http://www.typeracer.com

When staying at a comfortable pace, I do 70 with dvorak. I can probably write as fast with qwerty, so I'm not using dvorak for the speed. It is a matter of comfort and, well, effortlessness that makes me use dvorak.

Of course, that might be because I write dvorak blind, the 'right' way, while my qwerty was always some self-learned bastard-technique. And that is probably the main reason I'd recommend the switch: It is THE best way to ditch all of your bad typing habits in one fell swoop, and using a superior layout afterwards is just a nice bonus.

[blueblimp]

I want to use it, being a programmer by trade, but unfortunately I don't really have the time to switch over. I mean, I can't really learn it when I'm working at a customer, that's not what they pay me for.

After 20 years of using Qwerty, I'm afraid I'm Qwerty for life.

IMO, Dvorak doesn't make any sense for programmers. It's optimized for English text. Code is not much like English text. I don't see any reason to expect a speed advantage over QWERTY.

[Davio]

I want to use it, being a programmer by trade, but unfortunately I don't really have the time to switch over. I mean, I can't really learn it when I'm working at a customer, that's not what they pay me for.

After 20 years of using Qwerty, I'm afraid I'm Qwerty for life.

IMO, Dvorak doesn't make any sense for programmers. It's optimized for English text. Code is not much like English text. I don't see any reason to expect a speed advantage over QWERTY.

False.

Depending on the language, you might use a little or a lot of English, but often you will use English.

- The keywords for a specific language (like C#) are often in English.
- The API for a specific platform (like .NET) is often in English.
- If I need to give variables a name I often give them English names.
- If I'm writing a comment, I often do it in English.

So there's a lot of English in my programs, even if the frontend text is Dutch.
If I start using Dutch names mixed with English keywords it just looks weird.

Heck, if you have a language like Progress OpenEdge, it is much more like English text than just braces, indexes and numbers, an example:

Code: [Select]

DEFINE VARIABLE w AS HANDLE NO-UNDO.
 
CREATE WINDOW w ASSIGN
    WIDTH = 50
    HEIGHT = 5
    MESSAGE-AREA = FALSE
    STATUS-AREA = FALSE.   
 
CURRENT-WINDOW = w.
 
DEFINE BUTTON btnOK LABEL "OK" SIZE 12 BY 1.2.
FORM
    "Hello World!" VIEW-AS TEXT AT COL 20 ROW 2
    btnOK AT COL 20 ROW 4
    WITH FRAME f SIZE 50 BY 5 NO-BOX THREE-D.
 
VIEW FRAME f.
ENABLE btnOK WITH FRAME f.
WAIT-FOR "CHOOSE" OF btnOK.
DELETE OBJECT w.


[Grujah]

- If I need to give variables a name I often give them English names.
- If I'm writing a comment, I often do it in English.

Dude, always. 

Still, you do not have sentence structure. Like, most common English words, like "the" or "is" are not the most common words, the most common letters probably aren't the most common letters.

[theory]

I'm curious about that.  What is it like, working as a programmer or doctor or ___ in a foreign country, where so much of what you do and learn depends on English?

[Davio]

I'm curious about that.  What is it like, working as a programmer or doctor or ___ in a foreign country, where so much of what you do and learn depends on English?

Well, I generally speak Dutch during the day, it's just the programming that I do in English.
It depends on the project. The project I'm working on now is for the Dutch market, so the names of the entities are in Dutch. Still I like to use English as much as I can in my code. It's easier for Dutch programmers to understand English than it is for international programmers (from cheap wage countries like former Yugoslavia or India) to understand Dutch.

Then again, I've worked on a project that was targeted for international use which used Dutch variable and function names.

But I'm basically a child of the internet generation, I grew up without it initially and when I was about 14 we got our first internet capable PC at home. Because of the dominance of the US on the web, I picked it up very easily. And searches in English would yield way more results than searches in Dutch, so I gladly accepted that English would be the main language of this generation.

I still like to use the English Wikipedia over the Dutch one whenever I'm looking up a global or foreign topic.

You have to understand though that Holland is a very western and international oriented country so even our average Joes will be able to speak some English words. We get movies and TV series in English and put Dutch subtitles under them.

Although English is my second language, because of how often I use it (for these forums for instance), it's more like my 1.5th language. Sometimes it's even easier for me to think of an English way of saying things than a Dutch way and I found myself struggling to translate it back to Dutch.

[dor]

I'm curious about that.  What is it like, working as a programmer or doctor or ___ in a foreign country, where so much of what you do and learn depends on English?

In a typical Israeli start-up filled with native Hebrew speakers, all verbal communication is done in Hebrew but emails, documentation and of course the code itself is strictly in English.
It's pretty easy getting used to it when learning English from grade school.

EDIT: I guess that Hebrew being a right-to-left language makes it harder to use technical terms in English when writing Hebrew text, at least when comparing to Dutch and the likes, so it's simply easier to do everything in English to begin with.

[Davio]

Dutch to English is actually a small step, since they're both in the same language family and the countries are only a couple of miles apart.
Same with German and French which both get taught at our schools.

The more we go to the east, the harder it gets for us, but that's because we can't track back words anymore.

A word like 'beer' in other languages:
Dutch: bier
French: bière
German: bier
Russian: пиво

Russian might as well be hieroglyphics to me.

So kudos on dealing with switching between Hebrew and English all day! I guess you guys have Qwerty's or do you have special Hebrew keyboards?

[dor]

The Hebrew keyboard is bilingual, using QWERTY for English and a standard Hebrew layout, like so: http://www.hebrew-keyboards.com/IMG_0926.jpg . There are also trilingual keyboards for native Arabic and Russian speakers.

English is common here pretty much as it is in The Netherlands (which is the non-English speaking country I found the easiest to get by in). Lots of movies and TV shows in English here as well, mandatory secondary language at school, etc.

But most of all it's the lack of a localized version of Dominion that forces us to learn English from an early age

* BTW, beer in Hebrew is pronounced Bee-ra

[Davio]

I guess you guys were pretty happy when Unicode arrived! 

[Grujah]

I'm curious about that.  What is it like, working as a programmer or doctor or ___ in a foreign country, where so much of what you do and learn depends on English?

You learn in school (Middle, High) and in front of TV/Computer screen, basically. I am studying Software Engineering, we had English in first year of college and... well, professor just auto-passed everybody - but was like "I don't want to bore you with this class, if you do not know enough English by now, what are you doing here?" Althrough there are some books in Serbian, it is recommend and encouraged that you learn from English books. 

Dutch to English is actually a small step, since they're both in the same language family and the countries are only a couple of miles apart.
Same with German and French which both get taught at our schools.

The more we go to the east, the harder it gets for us, but that's because we can't track back words anymore.

A word like 'beer' in other languages:
Dutch: bier
French: bière
German: bier
Russian: пиво

Russian might as well be hieroglyphics to me.

So kudos on dealing with switching between Hebrew and English all day! I guess you guys have Qwerty's or do you have special Hebrew keyboards?

Heh, here it is either pivo or пиво.

I use 3 layouts:

English
Serbian Latin - which is basically Euro-layout with čććžšđ
Serbian Cyrillic - which is basically Euro-layout with letters switched with their cyrillic equivalents (P = П) plus љњџчћжшђ

[Dulkal]

- If I need to give variables a name I often give them English names.
- If I'm writing a comment, I often do it in English.

Dude, always. 

Still, you do not have sentence structure. Like, most common English words, like "the" or "is" are not the most common words, the most common letters probably aren't the most common letters.

Still, a staggering proportion of words are more easily written on dvorak than qwerty. 'Qwerty', of cause, being the obvious exception.

[Davio]

Even if you don't have sentence structure with the common small words, I still think the letters appear in a ratio that's good enough to be used.

It's not like the API uses an abnormal number of Q's or Z's.

Besides, it's not like a programmer is programming all the time. I'm busy writing on the forum, writing emails and sometimes I have to write documentation as well.

So a keyboard which is optimized for English is good enough for me, but I'd just like to have the symbols I use often, like the semi-colon, [], () and {} organized a little better.

[Grujah]

You're probably right.

I'd like to see lisp-based dvorak, though. 

[Kirian]

By the way, how fast do you all type?  http://www.typeracer.com

I get about 60-70 wpm on tests like that one.  When I'm extemporizing, I can get up to 90-100.  Such is the problem of not learning touch-typing.

You have to understand though that Holland is a very western and international oriented country so even our average Joes will be able to speak some English words. We get movies and TV series in English and put Dutch subtitles under them.

This is true not just of the Netherlands but also of most of Europe, as I understand it.  Some countries are better about being willing to converse in English than others, but almost everyone, in Northern Europe especially, knows English.  Here in the US, of course, learning a foreign language is uncommon even among the highly educated.  I'm ashamed to admit I've forgotten 90% of the German I learned in high school, and haven't tried to learn another language, or keep up with the German, in the ~19 years since I last took a language course.  That said, I love linguistics.  Therefore:

The more we go to the east, the harder it gets for us, but that's because we can't track back words anymore.

A word like 'beer' in other languages:
Dutch: bier
French: bière
German: bier
Russian: пиво

Eh, it's a loanword in French though.  French is no closer to Dutch and German than either of those are to Russian or Serbian.

And then of course there's the wacky Finns/Hungarians/Turks.

[eHalcyon]

Is Dvorak actually that much better than QWERTY?  Last time I looked into it, there was a lot of conflicting research and most sources were biased.

[Dulkal]

Is Dvorak actually that much better than QWERTY?  Last time I looked into it, there was a lot of conflicting research and most sources were biased.

I can't give you any research per se, but try picking 10 random words and see how the fingering pattering would look on Dvorak vs. Qwerty. My guess is that about 7 of them will be visibly more accessible on Dvorak, and the last 3 would be equal.

In other words: I can't back it up scientifically, but yes, it's better by a large margin.

[Lekkit]

Ever since I saw a Veyboard at my mother's work place when I was six, I've been wanting to learn to use it. It's a whole different keyboard than the usual, but it's fast. Like super fast. And it looks really weird.