Something to look into and perhaps to reject if based on purely pragmatic
grounds. No yet proven ergonomic advantage exists for the Dvorak layout.
The fact that more left-hand-only words exist for QWERTY is actually an
advantage to QWERTY nowadays, given the standard position of the cursor
and numeric keys and the near-universal placement of the mouse to the
right of the keyboard.
I'd think a much more important factor is that pretty much nobody's
productivity is strongly affected by typing speed anymore. Back when
people did huge amounts of manual data entry and typists rattled off the
boss's presentations for him, taking dictation, maybe. Nowadays? Check
the Java want ads. Even this verbose language's want ads mention JDBC,
SQL, and other acronymic areas of knowledge required but don't mention
typing speed, unlike ads for typists forty years ago.
The reason is pretty clear: rote data entry and dictation are something
machines do now, with humans merely proofreading and making the odd
correction to the scanos; meanwhile, typing, whether it's a blog post or
a computer program, tends to be only a small percentage of the work done
-- *thinking* is by far larger, and some amount of error-checking (such
as compiling, testing, and debugging code, or proofreading prose). The
limiting factor on productivity for Java programmers, in particular, is
likely to be how fast they can come up with what the next line of code
should be, rather than how fast they can actually type it in once
they've thought of it.
And then there are alternative JVM languages like Scala and Clojure that
potentially cut the amount to be typed in by half or more.
