[jerf]

And quite a bit of evidence that suggests that the "myth" arguments are recycled propaganda from a guy in the early twentieth century who had an axe to grind. Since nobody's actually done significant, unquestionable science on the topic, it's hard to know.

The concept of somebody having an axe to grind about keyboard layouts strikes us as weird in the 21st century when switching keyboard layouts is one quick command in Linux, but back then there was money at stake. I take the whole argument both ways with a grain of salt and say that since there is no respectable science, personal experience is the only thing that you can use to decide.

(A lot of people come to understand that science is superior to anecdotes and personal experience, but when there is no science, anecdotes and personal experience are still better than nothing. If that bothers you, consider the contrapositive, and what it would mean for that to be false.)

I note that I modded you up, though, because the articles are still informative and useful to come to your own conclusion about what I've said in my comment.

[lliiffee]

> And quite a bit of evidence that suggests that the "myth" arguments are recycled propaganda from a guy in the early twentieth century who had an axe to grind.

Really? Where? (I'm not being sarcastic-- you are being specific enough that you clearly have something specific in mind.)

[silentbicycle]

I'm not the poster above, but the best-known example of propagandizing about them is a paper called "The Fable of the Keys" by Liebowitz and Margolis (http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html), which dragged the Qwerty vs. Dvorak issue into the middle of an academic holy war about the free market. Much of the resulting Qwerty vs. Dvorak arguments have really been about economics, not their actual merits as keyboard layouts. (The only argument about the layouts themselves in the paper concerns whether typing on Dvorak is inherently faster.) The two links lliiffee gave above are by the authors of "The Fable of the Keys" and a newspaper column including a refutation by marketing professor, respectively. (I'm not sure who the "guy in the early twentieth century who had an axe to grind" jerf mentions is, though.)

Now, I really don't care about economic ideology, but I like facts. The Dvorak keyboard places more frequently used letters on the home row than Qwerty* . Also, all of the vowels are on the left hand, which means that typing will generally alternate between hands.

If you agree that it is better to spend most time typing on the home row (to reduce finger travel and general hand contortion/RSI) and to not type several letters in a row on the same hand (compare "reverberated" to "antiskepticism" on Qwerty, for example), then Dvorak is objectively better by your standards. (All bets are off if you're typing in Czech or something, of course.)

* Specifically, "asdfg hjkl;" vs. "aoeui dhtns". Semicolon! I suppose Qwerty could have PrintScrn/SysRq there instead, though.

[jerf]

That's definitely the biggest one I was thinking of. QWERTY v. Dvorak has gone in many strange directions, but if you look for the actual science, it is at best quite split, and at worst, all the relevant studies were done by people with very strong preexisting opinions, leaving us with not much to go on. (I include Dvorak's own studies here, for the sake of argument.)

But the claims that Dvorak has no advantages over QWERTY really don't pass the smell test. It's almost certainly more a matter of whether it's worth it for someone to switch, on which I'm very ambivalent.

There's also the interesting question of whether it would be better to start on Dvorak, which I'll have to ponder here in the future now that I have a baby. Personal experience would suggest that someone raised on Dvorak is much more likely to learn actual touch typing.

(I was on QWERTY for over a decade and still doing the same wandering-hands thing everybody else does, because QWERTY doesn't reward touch typing. Touch typing on QWERTY is like the official way to swing a baseball bat; everybody has to learn it, but hardly anybody does it and even at the pro level everybody does their own thing. Dvorak and most of the other alternate layouts reward it very strongly. You don't even have to teach it, it just happens.)

[silentbicycle]

> It's almost certainly more a matter of whether it's worth it for someone to switch[.]

Agreed. For programmers, I would say the odds are good - you'll be doing a lot of typing, and RSI is a real concern. For people who do a lot of typing on other peoples' computers, planning around what's widely available (qwerty & vi on Unix, for example) is probably a better choice.

> QWERTY doesn't reward touch typing.

Good observation! Dvorak seems more clearly designed with touch-typing in mind, I think.

(As a data point: I type "wandering-hands" on Qwerty at 95-105 wpm, and about same on Dvorak. The typing isn't the bottleneck.)

[lliiffee]

Thanks. It was really that "guy in the early 20th century" part that was really confusing to me.

Anyway, I guess we agree. I find it plausible that Dvorak would be more efficient (I've even switched briefly before), but don't think there is any credible scientific evidence of it.