D beyond the specs

[jmh530]

On Friday, 16 March 2018 at 16:02:07 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>
> Allow me to put on my economist hat and say you might be 
> looking for explanations when none are required. Much of 
> programming language adoption involves choosing languages 
> others are using (see, well, any conversation about programming 
> languages if you don't think it matters, or even the continued 
> use of C++). There doesn't have to be a reason to settle on a 
> particular language. Perfect example is the qwerty keyboard. 
> There's nothing special about a qwerty keyboard. That is the 
> arrangement of keys that some guy randomly chose many decades 
> back. We continue to use qwerty because that's what we use - 
> not for any particular reason.

We use qwerty because that's what the first commercially 
successful typewriter used. When computers came about, they 
needed to get people to transition over. Keeping qwerty was the 
optimal decision because of marginal costs and marginal benefits, 
not just random decisions.

Its creator didn't choose it randomly. He put the keys that were 
most common where it was easiest to get at them, but it jammed if 
people were typing too quickly so he made you type the most 
common letters with your left hand instead of right.

Some people bring up the Dvorak keyboard, but the evidence that 
it was better was scant and the marginal benefit of switching was 
too small to justify the cost.