The title would probably be confusing, but I could not make it better than this. I noticed that most programming languages are limited to the alphanumerical set along with the special characters present in a general keyboard. I wondered if this posed a barrier for developers on what characters they were limited to program in, or if it was intentional from the start that these keys would be the most optimal characters for a program to be coded in by a human and was later adopted as a standard for every user. Basically, are the modern keyboards built around programming languages or are programming languages built around these keyboards?
The point wasn’t to slow down typists, but to reduce the number of bigrams (two-letter sequences) that would be typed with adjacent keys, since that’s the specific movement that’s most likely to cause the key levers to jam.
Not true. The current layout is the result of years of evolution based on feedback by typists and vendors.