This is a response to
Solderpunk vs the windmills - Keyboard hegemony
First, I grew up with the Swedish/Finnish layout. It's absolutely horrible for writing code or using *nix. It's even worse for MS-DOS, the operating system of my childhood. Whereas on the US layout you have a dedicated key for \, the DOS directory separator, on the SWE layout you use AltGr--. All the common special characters are really hard to reach. On the other hand a couple of weird special characters are very easy to type; namely § ½ ¤. Really.
I've used the US layout for almost a decade now.[†] Usually with a SWE labeled keyboard. I almost consider the choice of keyboard layout a Shibboleth for good Finnish hackers. SWE is ubiquitous and it takes effort to learn US, but the ergonomics for hacking is just much better.
is indeed important and often overlooked. Consider APL:
↑1 ⍵∨.∧3 4=+/,¯1 0 1∘.⊖¯1 0 1∘.⌽⊂⍵ ⍝ John Conway's "Game of Life" in APL.
APL didn't pick the easy characters, but rather ones that are good for notation. In the past, this meant having *dedicated physical keyboards just for APL*.
A similar language, J, takes the array programming paradigm but uses ASCII characters. Here's an implementation of the Game of Life in J.
(3 3 (+/ e. 3+0,4&{)@,;._3 ])@(0,0,~0,.0,.~])
The version in APL looks like an alien language. The version in J looks like line noise (corrupt data). Which one is more readable? Neither, if you haven't learned the notation. But from my brief dabbling with each I personally believe picking a new notation for new concepts is a good idea, and by extension APL is a well designed language that doesn't get the attention it deserves.
Mathematics is certainly easier to read with full mathematical notation than one flattened to ASCII. Not saying reading mathematics is ever easy; just saying it becomes almost impossible if you remove the well-defined notation. This would require a lot of text:
¬∃x∈XP(x) ≡ ∀x∈X¬P(x) ≢ ¬∀x∈XP(x) ≡ ∃x∈X¬P(x)
Future programming language designers, please consider notation.
[†]: I actually don't use US QWERTY anymore. I did some frequency analysis of my own corpus and swapping two pairs of keys makes the keyboard much more ergonomic on average for my weird combination of code, English and Finnish. At four pairs swapped it would be comparable to best existing layouts, eg. Colemak (for my corpus and my effort model). I've been planning to blog about this for two years now.