[kmeisthax]

>If the world worked differently, we wouldn’t still be writing on QWERTY keyboards, or speaking English; technically superior alternatives like Dvorak and Esperanto would have taken over.

Bad metaphor: There is no evidence for Dvorak's technical superiority to QWERTY, neither is there for Esperanto over other languages.

[cbsmith]

I think the "technically superior" bit wasn't really the right choice of words.

Esperanto isn't intended to be superior. It's value is on it being equally foreign yet approachable for all the salient parties and therefore a conceivable acceptable neutral turf for everyone to share.

Ironically, the case for Dvorak keyboards is kind of the opposite: QWERTY was intentionally designed to avoid jams, which if anything biased towards making it more difficult.

It's not so much technical superiority as having a design objective that is more appropriate for the problem space.

One can similarly argue about whether "QUEL" is really technically superior to "SQL", but the design objective is (at least as perceived by the author) better aligned with the solution space.

[k1t]

> QWERTY was intentionally designed to avoid jams

Minor quibble that this is not true (or at least strongly disputed).

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-...

[cbsmith]

I'm pretty sure the author was referring to the lore, regardless of what the truth might be. Otherwise they'd have had to present a much more detailed explanation.

[thaumasiotes]

> Esperanto isn't intended to be superior. It's value is on it being equally foreign yet approachable for all the salient parties and therefore a conceivable acceptable neutral turf for everyone to share.

This was not even attempted; Esperanto is a Romance language. Unless you think the only salient parties are Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, and Latin America, this "value" does not exist and was not a goal.

[mijamo]

Esperanto is not a romance language. It incorporates elements from most european languages families (balto-slavic, germanic, romance), and the grammar is most particularly inspired by slavic languages.

And it was pretty much a goal of its creator to be both familiar and foreign for different european language families, as he had experienced division in Poland between speakers of those different families and wanted to have something more universal to gather them all together.

[eska]

We're still ignoring the entire Asian and African continents then, though.

[cbsmith]

Yes, in the design context of the creation of the language, that was not in scope, though there are arguments that it's word-formation mechanism bears more resemblance to Chinese than European languages.

[cbsmith]

The vocabulary is primarily from Romance languages, but the whole story is more complicated. From the Wikipedia page: "Esperanto's phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and semantics are based on the Indo-European languages spoken in Europe. The sound inventory is essentially Slavic, as is much of the semantics, whereas the vocabulary derives primarily from the Romance languages, with a lesser contribution from Germanic languages and minor contributions from Slavic languages and Greek. Pragmatics and other aspects of the language not specified by Zamenhof's original documents were influenced by the native languages of early authors, primarily Russian, Polish, German, and French. Paul Wexler proposes that Esperanto is relexified Yiddish, which he claims is in turn a relexified Slavic language,[72] though this model is not accepted by mainstream academics.[73]

Esperanto has been described as "a language lexically predominantly Romanic, morphologically intensively agglutinative, and to a certain degree isolating in character".[74] Typologically, Esperanto has prepositions and a pragmatic word order that by default is subject–verb–object. Adjectives can be freely placed before or after the nouns they modify, though placing them before the noun is more common. New words are formed through extensive prefixing and suffixing."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

[nine_k]

Esperanto is similar to a bunch of Roman languages widespread in Europe. One can see it as an attempt to collect them back into a common "Latin 2.0".

Outside Western Europe, Esperanto makes rather little sense. It's highly regular, which is nice — but, say, Japanese is also highly regular.

[ithkuil]

Yes it's based off european languages; it was designed in a time when removing barriers from neighboring countries in a culturally very fragmented continent was perceived of higher practical value than creating a pan-human language; intercontinental travel wasn't yet as commonplace as now, yet many european countries had different cultures living within the boundaries of the same states and usually members of the majority culture were privileged as a result; there was hope (espero in esperanto) that people could forget about differences among them and see what they have in common.

Today we can be tempted to frame it as european chauvinism, but that's just because of our expanded horizons as a global society. People who believes in esperanto in the early days would likely share the same feeling now

[tbenst]

Dvorak is 25% more efficient than Qwerty using some very reasonable calculations: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?dvorak

[bsder]

And by some other measures (hand alternation of fingers) Dvorak is less efficient.

QWERTY isn't as bad as people make it out to be, and Dvorak isn't as good as people make it out to be.

There are keyboard configurations that are better than both, but nobody uses them because you'll never be able to use anybody else's keyboard.

[edjroot]

> nobody uses them because you'll never be able to use anybody else's keyboard

I doubt that's the main reason, and it may be unwarranted as I say below. Personally, I thought it would take too long for me to be able to type as fast as in QWERTY. Fortunately, I was wrong about that too.

I learned the QGMLW optimized layout from Carpalx (linked above) about a year ago. I trained on https://keybr.com and then on https://typeracer.com for a few days and in less than a week I reached 70wpm. I stopped training shortly after and now I can usually reach 90-100wpm. Not particularly fast, but I'm not any faster in QWERTY, and I believe I could get faster if I trained more.

Even though I almost never type in QWERTY anymore, when I do I'm still just as fast as I used to be. I never learned to type in QWERTY "the right way", though, and I suppose this is actually what keeps me from confusing the two "modes". Whenever I try to keep my fingers on their "appropriate" keys (like a properly trained typist would), it's like my brain switches to "Carpalx mode" (since I did make an effort to use the right finger positioning to learn it). It's kinda like switching between thinking in my native language and English - I can think in both, but it doesn't "feel" the same, and I'm more likely to confuse the two where they overlap more. Pretty interesting, really.

[greenshackle2]

Yeah I did the same thing but I learned colemak. I never learned to touch-type qwerty, when I learned touch-typing I switched to colemak. I feel like it made things easier as I didn't have bad habits to fall back on.

I can still type qwerty but I'm not very fast at it (I never was).

[sergeykish]

Dvorak is that good. QWERTY is not the worst.

People always rationalize their inability to change. Those who made a step knows both rewards and cost. It was worth it hundred times.