[pavlov]

There’s so many assumptions here about a person who’s starting to learn programming.

For starters, that they’re on Linux, they feel comfortable running complex CLI commands, they can memorize the U.S. layout just like that, and that they can type without looking at the physical keys (because changing the virtual mapping means keys produce something else than what the label says).

In reality, the learner’s first exposure to C family languages is more likely to be a website where you can run some JavaScript in a text box. And the first hurdle is to figure out how to even type {}. American developers just completely forget about that.

[ulbu]

Installation of Windows and MacOS defaults to US + local layouts.

[anthk]

On the long term, using the native keyboard hinders yourself a lot. I tried to do so with the Spanish (es) layout, it's pretty much unergonomical.

It's looks like being deliberately designed for press/office usage and not for proper programming.

[pavlov]

I’ve been writing C and its progeny (C++, JavaScript, Rust etc.) since 1990 on a Finnish keyboard.

The AltGr brackets are fine. The truly annoying character to type is the backtick (which is a quite new addition to the pantheon of special characters, C doesn’t use it).

My personal opinion is that Niklaus Wirth had the better overall ideas about clarity and inclusiveness in programming language design, but that battle is long lost. (What you consider the character set needed for "proper programming" is really a relatively new development, mid-1990s and later.)

[schoen]

Backticks were fairly important for shell scripting in the past, but have officially been replaced with $(), which can be nested.

My intuition is that Perl would be the most challenging on a keyboard where it's harder to type unusual punctuation, since it feels like a very punctuation-heavy language, but I don't know whether it actually uses more than C (I think the backtick has a shell-style meaning in Perl too).

[psychoslave]

>it's pretty much unergonomical.

Well unless opting for something like Dvorak, you are indeed doomed to something that was specificcaly designed to please typewriter mechanical constraints without much care for the resulting ergonomics.

I use a Bépo layout personally, on a Typematrix 2030 most of the time, as French is my native language.

[SSLy]

or maybe popular proglangs were designed for writing on USAn press/office keyboards – remember that UNIX came to be as a typesetting appliance — disregarding anyone else.