Dvorak Layout Claimed Not Superior To QWERTY 663
Michael Pyne sends in an article published at Reason Online 13 years ago, dismantling the entrenched myth that the Dvorak keyboard layout is a superior technology to QWERTY. The odd thing is that this 13-year-old article recaps research (refereed and published in a respected economics journal) 19 years ago. While we have discussed Dvorak many times over the years, I don't believe we have dug into this convincing-sounding refutation of the Dvorak mythology. The article is in the context of arguing against the conventional wisdom of "first mover advantage" — that the first product to market gains a large entrenchment benefit, such as VHS vs. Beta, MS-DOS vs. anything, etc. It's very much a pro-markets piece.
Dvorak (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dvorak (Score:5, Funny)
Blaarrh.... old joke.
Though I wouldn't want to type on him.
Re:Dvorak (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dvorak (Score:5, Funny)
I noticed your handle was about sexual intercourse with ancient computing equipment. I've descended to inform you that no electronic machinery will surpass the conventional branches of sexual intercourse, and doing what you do could be a danger to your health.
Thanks.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I noticed your name is gEvil (beta), and I'm here to tell you that Betamax is NOT superior to VHS.
I suspect that it's actually a play on Google's habit of sticking (beta) on everything they do. Google are famously "not evil". The username might be the owner's opinion that Google are becoming evil (ie in a beta release of evil) and that they could have a product name called gEvil (in the same vein as gmail etc).
Re:Dvorak (Score:5, Informative)
See http://www.geocities.com/videoholic2000/BetaBetter.html [geocities.com] or even http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-VHS [wikipedia.org]
So betamax was better. But VHS won the format war anyway.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dvorak (Score:4, Insightful)
By 1977, VHS could typically squeeze four hours onto a single T-120 video tape, while Betamax was limited at that time to one hour per tape. When considering whether one thing is "better" than another, you have to look at the whole picture. Betamax's picture was higher quality, but in every other respect, it failed every test. Consumers consistently chose recording length over picture quality, because it's better to get a fuzzy recording of a movie than only the first half.
And by the time VHS was launched in the UK, in 1978, both could record 3 hours (PAL VHS recorded a shorter time on the same length tape, for some reason). The benefit was entirely temporary, and the only effect that it had was that by 1980 VHS had a large established market share. By this point, Betamax was technically superior in every respect. Yet still it did not win the format war, because, as we all know, a significant investment in incompatible techology makes it much harder for a competitor with lower market share to be sold. Which is the GP's point. The parallels here are:
VHS, when introduced, was superior to Betamax, so it became most popular quickly.
QWERTY, when introduced, was superior to its competitors, so it became most popular quickly.
Betamax was improved and became technically superior to VHS, but by this point it was too late because VHS had a dominant market share and people did not want incompatible technology.
Dvorak was introduced and was technically superior to QWERTY, but by this point it was too late because QWERTY had a dominant market share and pepole did not want to have to learn two keyboard layouts.
The analogy is pretty good.
Re:Dvorak (Score:4, Informative)
Dvorak was introduced and was technically superior to QWERTY, but by this point it was too late because QWERTY had a dominant market share and pepole did not want to have to learn two keyboard layouts.
The analogy is pretty good.
Actually, the whole thrust of the article was how myths get repeated enough that they become accepted as facts. In the case of QWERTY vs DVORAK, that while many people believe DVORAK was superior; properly conducted tests show no inherent advantage to the DVORAK keyboard. As a result, there is no reason to switch.
As a result, an number of arguments using QWERTY adoption as there basis for conclusions are invalid.
Re:Dvorak (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the whole thrust of the article was how myths get repeated enough that they become accepted as facts. In the case of QWERTY vs DVORAK, that while many people believe DVORAK was superior; properly conducted tests show no inherent advantage to the DVORAK keyboard. As a result, there is no reason to switch.
The artice, and the research it was based on, were both written by employees of a thinktank which set out to prove that the market always finds the best solution, and on misreadings of earlier research. They tried to "debunk" the idea that Dvorak is better than QWERTY because if it is true and the market-dominant QWERTY system was inferior, their thesis was wrong. With such a biased starting point, I'm not sure I trust anything they say or that their research was in any fashion neutral.
There's a very good article here [mwbrooks.com] which debunks the article we've been linked to here.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you believe the article. Personally I found it to be full of straw men, and seemed to be trying very hard to twist the truth towards his way of thinking for reasons that had nothing to do with keyboard layouts.
Huh? He referenced the original studies used to claim DVORAK was superior, one of which claimed to be flawed in the study, and provided sources for his claims.
What do you think is a strawman in the article?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
>>>No, so Betamax had slightly higher image quality
Everybody says this, but they never back it up. It simply isn't true. Betamax records 3 megahertz of bandwidth, identical to what VHS records. There's no difference. I recall in college a friend invited me to watch her Betamax VCR, and she proclaimed it's better than VHS, which being an engineering geek intrigued me. So I sat, and I watched, and I honestly saw no difference.
In fact, I saw FAR more difference in the college's Super VHS units wh
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
>>>First mover advantage is real, as is best product advantage.
If that were true we'd all be using Betamax, because Betamax beat VHS to market by a full year. (Actually, Sony's Umatic was the first on the scene back in 1970, with full support of all companies.) It appears the first mover advantage is Not real. Lots of first-to-market items flop:
- laserdisc beat both CD and DVD but failed to win the market
- Genesis/Megadrive beat Super Nintendo by about two years, but SNES still outsold it by ~30
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>When a technology is introduced, a small number of people are willing to pay an early adopter premium.
One mistake Sony made with Betamax was to screw their early adopters. They first sold Betamax-I, and then they followed it up with Betamax-II with many movies sold in that format. The early adopters were left with Betamax-I players that could not handle the new media, and naturally they were pissed. You do NOT want to make your loyal fanbase angry.
Sony is used to dealing with professionals, w
Not good enough (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Not good enough (Score:5, Interesting)
I can type fast because of experience and muscle memory but I don't allocate one finger to a few keys, then allocate another finger to another set of keys as learned in a rigorous keyboarding class.
Part of exercising a set of fingers is ensuring that they get the full range of motion and not just the cramped(but reportedly more efficient) "most commonly used in a single row" idea behind dvorak. But Your mileage and experience may vary.
Re:Not good enough (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not good enough (Score:5, Insightful)
What about bouncing between Dvorak and QWERTY? I assume that you've had to type on a keyboard other than your own on more than one occasion. I tried to use Dvorak for a short while but gave up because of that more than anything else.
Re:Not good enough (Score:5, Informative)
What about bouncing between Dvorak and QWERTY? I assume that you've had to type on a keyboard other than your own on more than one occasion.
Well, at first, I figured out just how easy it is to switch keymaps on most modern OSes. Unfortunately, when I forgot to change it back, I left a wake of "My keyboard is broken!" computers in my wake.
I've actually gotten to the point where I can use both, and QWERTY is reasonably fast, though still not as comfortable. It takes a bit to get used to, and my error rate goes way up, but the difference is basically kicking me back to 30-40 WPM -- I'm typing this sentence in QWERTY to prove that point.
But, since I have a laptop, I can pretty much type the way I want most of the time. It also is yet another customization of said laptop that discourages others from using it without supervision.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not good enough (Score:5, Informative)
I used to use Dvorak - did for about 10 years. What made me switch back?
First, I wasn't really any faster with Dvorak than Qwerty.
Second, Windows is messed up. When I had the Dvorak keyboard loaded at work, if I called the help desk and they tried to log into my machine, their typing would come out as though they'd typed Qwerty on a Dvorak keyboard - gibberish. I would have to reboot before calling the help desk. There were other weird things, too - if I logged in then changed the keyboard layout, Windows' password prompt would still be whatever the keyboard was when I logged in.
The headaches of dealing with it got old.
I would add another problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The common shortcuts are too valuable to give up. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X, Alt-F, etc. are all in the wrong place on the keyboard when you switch to Dvorak. I tried to learn it for a little while, but I quickly gave up after running into this real-world problem.
Yeah, I suppose I could've gone through and re-mapped those shortcuts, but that would've been a pain in the butt doing at every computer I ever sit down at, for every application.
Re:Not good enough (Score:5, Interesting)
I spent maybe 4-5 years touch-typing in Qwerty, and the past 5 in Dvorak, and I much prefer it. The amount of motion necessary to type is much smaller. I'm probably not significantly faster than I was in Qwerty, but the conservation of movement makes my hands feel a lot more relaxed. Even if it's all just mental, I think it's worth it.
Sure, it's not for everyone. And it's not worth this back and forth battle of "proof" about which one is better. It's just an alternative, there for you to try if you want.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I think you mean "the French have a different keyboard layout called AZERTY".
Re:Not good enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Thats a myth, QWERTY was not there to slow the typist down, but to speed them up. Letters that would jam where places further apart, so less jamming and more speed as the result. As a result QWERTY is simply the solution to a problem that no longer exist.
Re:Not good enough (Score:4, Informative)
I DO use both keyboard layouts at work. I use two laptops side by side, Linux/Dvorkian on one, WinXP/Qwerty on the other (the WinXP box is locked down so hard I'm not ALLOWED to make any changes in setup). I've been a Qwerty typist for 26 years and have used Dvorak for almost 6. I'm moderately fast on both, and switch all day long. It IS a pain in the ass, but thankfully not in the wrist anymore. That was the big reason I switched: I started developing RSI in my right hand (I'm married, it wasn't caused by THAT). The keyboard layout change made all the difference between going under for surgery and recovering on my own. Efficiency may not be as uber as word of mouth says (I think it is), but it definitely made me feel physically better. As for TFA: I didn't read it (this IS slashdot, right?), but claiming Dvorak isn't better because it didn't dominate the market, neglects several significant factors (Industry inertia, marketing, the fact that it's DIFFERENT, and general lack of knowledge or care about it). A "market-based" argument isn't worth the electrons used to write it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As for TFA: I didn't read it (this IS slashdot, right?), but claiming Dvorak isn't better because it didn't dominate the market, neglects several significant factors ... A "market-based" argument isn't worth the electrons used to write it.
Well, I did RTFA, and that's not what it said. It cited several studies that concluded there was no benefit to speed from using Dvorak over QWERTY. They didn't really say anything about ergonomics, however.
Re:Not good enough (Score:4, Informative)
Ergonomic studies also confirm that the advantages of Dvorak are either small or nonexistent. For example, A. Miller and J Thomas, two researchers at the IBM Research Laboratory, writing in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, conclude that "no alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over the QWERTY for general purpose typing." Other studies based on analysis of hand-and-finger motions find differences of only a few percentage points between Dvorak and QWERTY. The consistent finding in ergonomic studies is that the results imply no clear advantage for Dvorak, and certainly no advantage of the magnitude that is so often claimed.
Re:Not good enough (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not good enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of exercising a set of fingers is ensuring that they get the full range of motion and not just the cramped(but reportedly more efficient) "most commonly used in a single row" idea behind dvorak.
You seem to be implying that qwerty exists for ergonomic reasons, rather than minimizing the tangling of mechanical components of type writers.
gotta say (Score:3, Funny)
tl;dr
Re:gotta say (Score:5, Funny)
Still learning the new layout?
.nnw C mgoy oaf (Score:3, Funny)
Ydco b., nafrgy co k.pf jrbugocbi abe jrgby.p cbygcyck.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In case you cant work out Dvorak -> QWERTY, parent says:
<subject>ell, i must say</subject>
this new layout is very confusing and counter intuitive
Re:gotta say (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's the tl;dr version as a public service for everyone but me that didn't RTFA..
There is no evidence that Dvorak is faster. The only evidence is from Dvorak's own book.
Many places cite an old navy study as confirming that Dvorak is better/faster however upon trying to obtain a copy they couldn't find one, leading the author to believe that the people making the claims didn't even read the study but quoted from each other.
When he did find a copy in some persons house it warned that the study wasn't a fair one. The author then describes how the two tests performed were unscientific and found evidence of data tampering to make Dvorak look better in the results.
You left out the pro-market spin (Score:5, Insightful)
The author ties it all into a criticism of path dependence, the fairly obvious idea that once a particular option becomes entrenched, it can keep superior options from replacing it. To do that, he cites studies that found retraining existing QWERTY typers in Dvorak wasn't cost effective compared to additional training in QWERTY.
Well, duh. That's almost what it means to be an entrenched option. We've reached a local maxima; movement to the global maxima would be costly. Whether or not Dvorak is superior, it is highly unlikely that QWERTY is the perfectly optimal layout, so there's probably some better layout. Yet we're stuck with QWERTY for the conceivable future because QWERTY came first. That is path dependence in action.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You are forgetting that the technology changes.
Yes, QWERTY probably was the fastest TYPEWRITER layout—because, as everyone acknowledges, it was designed to prevent jamming (placing often-used keys further apart).
I'll bet if someone made a typewriter with QWERTY layout and another with Dvorak layout, QWERTY typists would win these competitions all the time, because Dvorak typists will be too busy getting their typewriter jammed (or deliberately slowing themselves so that the key wouldn't jam).
But, are
Palantype, Velotype, Stenotype (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're serious about typing at high speeds, you know better than to use a sequential keyboard, you go for chorded. A sequential keyboard is one where you type all letters in sequence, such as the common qwerty or dvorak. A chorded keyboard is parallel in the sense that you type whole syllables at the same time; it's kind of like playing the piano. Instead of typing s-y-l-l-a-b-l-e, you'd type syl-la-ble. Do that at speed and you're golden; you can get around three times the speed of ten-fingered qwerty once you're into the system and have it in muscle memory.
The sad truth is of course that that qwerty is here to stay since it has no barrier to entrance: you start with hunt and peck and take off from there. Chorded keyboards take conscious effort to master, but once you're trained on them, they're bliss.
Check out the Veyboard, by a Dutch company, it's one of the nicer chorded systems. (Doesn't lean heavy on abbrevs and cryptospeak like Stenotype.) http://www.veyboard.nl
Re:Palantype, Velotype, Stenotype (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on what you have to type.
chorded keyboards, just like most technologies that try to make life 'easier' on users are built around usage assumptions, making those uses easier but making other uses more difficult.
One of qwerty's strenghts over these special-purpose systems is, well, it is general purpose. You can do more with them but nothing all that well.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How are chorded systems like that for coding, when it's not just English you're typing?
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum had something like this. Its particular solution didn't exactly sweep the world off its feet it seems.
Re:Palantype, Velotype, Stenotype (Score:4, Interesting)
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum had something like this. Its particular solution didn't exactly sweep the world off its feet it seems.
There are probably two reasons for this:
* The Spectrum's input system was designed by Sir Clive Sinclair, who really wasn't a master of sensible product design. Somebody with a good knowledge of how input techniques are learned could design a much better system.
* The primary goal of the spectrum's input system was _not_ to enable faster program entry (although this was a side effect). The main point was to reduce the complexity of the BASIC interpreter and at the same time increase program storage capacity by using only a single character for storage of BASIC keywords in RAM. This enabled Sinclair BASIC to be faster and smaller than most of its competitors, and let more useful programs run in the 16K of RAM available on early model Spectrums. The easiest way of achieving this was to have extended input modes to enter those keywords as a single keystroke (the later Spectrum 128K models allowed direct text entry, but required an additional 16K of ROM that was paged in and out in order to achieve this).
Re:Palantype, Velotype, Stenotype (Score:5, Informative)
dvorak is fine for coding, especially when you type verbose variable names and comments -- usually in English, because that is the defacto language for code.
You're absolutely right about thinking keeping up, but this is also like the question of burst vs sustained bandwidth. I probably type very slowly most of the time, spend more time thinking. Occasionally, though, I get a burst of insight, or I find myself doing something repetitive, like unit tests. Then, it's useful to be able to type fast -- and again, English does help.
I would also argue that substitution outside of unit tests hints at broken design, just as reliance on copy and paste would.
I use dvorak not for the speed (Score:5, Informative)
but because it saved my writs from the carpal tunnel syndrome. I really started to feel pain in my wrists, after switching to dvorak it vanished. Now, tell me what you want, it may be a placebo effect or whatever, but my fingers move less on the keyboard, I write about 10wpm faster than I did before with qwerty (150 vs 140), and best of all I don't feel any pain any more.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, because moving less is the solution.
Re:I use dvorak not for the speed (Score:5, Informative)
hehe.. actually, it was sarcasm. Hovering your hands over the keyboard and moving them as little as possible is exactly how you get CTS. This is why kids don't get taught the "home row" method of typing anymore. Correct posture is to rest your wrist in front of the keyboard and reach for the keys. This is called, among over things, the "reach method". The purpose is to encourage as much movement as possible. Exercise, it's not just for your legs.
Re:I use dvorak not for the speed (Score:4, Insightful)
Hovering your hands over the keyboard and moving them as little as possible is exactly how you get CTS...Exercise, it's not just for your legs.
Well, first of all there's plenty of debate on whether CTS can be caused by any activity (or lack thereof) at all. It seems to be mostly a genetic thing. There's real injury to be had through bad posture and repetitive motion and people usually confuse that with CTS.
As to the real injuries that these new methods are trying to prevent: The "hovering" part probably has more to do with them than the "moving as little as possible" part. It's a repetitive motion injury, so minimizing motion is definitely beneficial. Same for your legs too. Minimizing leg exercises will prevent a whole bunch of injuries that can only occur through over exercising.
Of course I'm not saying exercise is bad for you. Over exercising most definitely is, though. Especially if the motion is repetitive over many hours. I don't think anyone who can get injured from typing is having a problem with not enough exercise of their fingers. Having a high wrist pad that will allow you to always have your hands rested and never hovering as well as minimizing movement is probably a whole lot better than not hovering and increasing movement. Both are better than hovering AND increasing movement.
That said, I'm not a doctor. Just a guy who had repetitive motion injury on his wrists that seemed to get better after I switched to dvorak, as well as somebody with really bad shin splints that require me to not run as much as I would like to or risk really bad fractures.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sigh. RSI != CTS. Although there may be a link.
Re:I use dvorak not for the speed (Score:4, Insightful)
140 wpm? O_o
WPM is standardized at 5 keystrokes, so that's 700 keystrokes/minute or almost 12/second. I can barely do that if I'm just mashing the keyboard at random.
Re:I use dvorak not for the speed (Score:4, Insightful)
But claiming you can type as fast as the world record typist is like saying you can keep up lap swimming with Michael Phelps.
Re:I use dvorak not for the speed (Score:4, Informative)
No, in the real world, we measure words per minute by dividing the number of characters we type by five. Otherwise, your measured "typing speed" varies proportionately with the length of the words you are typing, even when you are in fact typing at exactly the same speed. That makes no sense.
Use Emacs or vi, not Dvorak (Score:5, Insightful)
I have never understood how merely rearranging the keys on the same fscking keyboard could make a real difference. Yeah, you might get a 6% improvement in typing speed. Who cares?
What would make a difference would be to make sure that you can press Control, Shift, Alt and at the same time press another key without dislocating your fingers. And to have an ergonomic layout of the surrounding keys (cursor movement, backspace, etc.). Our keyboards are in the stone age and the challenge is *not* the arrangement of the character keys, it's the arrangement of everything else. Where in a given layout your p's and q's actually are is a minor thing. Being able to move around your cursor and delete and edit things without leaving your home position can easily *double* your editing speed. That's the reason why people still love vi and Emacs. And this is not a joke.
That, or finally introduce foot pedals. It's a shame that even the most recent keyboards are still bound to torture your hands and your mind just to type capitals, to hit a key combo or to move two words back. Get a decent keyboard that allows to press the control key with the edge of your hand instead of with your pinky and use Emacs and you'll be in editing heaven. Pathetic...
Re:Use Emacs or vi, not Dvorak (Score:4, Interesting)
Working in a web shop where lunch conversation was occasionally about how thoroughly we had memorized the hotkeys for our favorite dev programs, I hacked up some foot pedals for one of our designers by destroying a usb keyboard and wiring directly into the keyboard's controller chip. What we eventually found was that the average desk worker does not maintain the same posture all day long, but instead alters it, shifting weight to the left, right, or center to alleviate fatigue. This made any particular arrangement of foot pedals uncomfortable to use throughout the course of the day because it required maintaining a specific posture or rearranging the pedals at every (previously unconscious) shift in the chair. Now, we did not have $1000 chairs, so perhaps foot pedals could work with some highly ergonomic office equipment, but our relatively simple setup didn't afford further testing.
As to what difference is made by rearranging the letters on the keyboard, I believe that the primary argument should not be about speed but efficiency. Most people type only in short bursts anyway, so wpm is a diminishing return metric above a certain threshold (I've heard around 35), but highly efficient layouts dramatically reduce the finger and wrist work required to type the same text, which reduces fatigue and injury. I suggest checking out http://klausler.com/evolved.html [klausler.com] for an example of unbiased methodology which shows that Dvorak reduces effort per text by over 50%, which I may add, has been my experience. I switched to Dvorak after I started noticing early signs of CTS (numbness, tingling, etc) and have had 0 problems since, 6 years later.
Re: (Score:3)
Not so often these days. Doesn't matter though, since I'm using OS X which supports Emacs shortcuts natively in all apps, so I'm constantly using them instead of moving my fingers to the cursor keys.
I don't know what you're are doing with your keyboard but I edit as often as I type and moving my hand to and from the home position again and again kills speed like nothing else. Hitting Control-b instead of arrow-left is much faster and easier...
Since editing and typing has fairly reasonable temporal locality, I've either entering text, or editing... moving my fingers away to the arrow keys isn't a big deal because I've doing other stuff. Anyways, usually, my editing involves start entering text at the beginning or the ending, both of those are Shift-i, and Shift-a respectively.
My point was you talking about chording. VI avoids chording, while Emacs promotes.
Although, I'm _SO_ with you on being able to Ctl-A and Ctl-E in order to move my cursor a
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's probably not carpal tunnel actually, most things people call that aren't they are some other kind of repetitive strain injury. At any rate if you've found something that helps, that's all that matters. One of the reasons could perhaps be not the layout, but if the keyboard itself is more ergonomic. I suffer from RSI and my solution was contoured keyboards. Lets me keep my wrists in a more neutral position.
At any rate the real key is do what works for you. There isn't a need to justify it to other peopl
!speed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:!speed (Score:5, Informative)
I think a glance at the top row is enough to disprove that -- qw/wq and yu/uy are the only uncommon two-letter combos, while extremely common ones like we, er/re, rt/tr, io/oi, and ty are present. There are even several common three letter combinations -- wer, tre, ert, rty, and poi. If you expand to include vertically adjacent keys, you'll find even more.
Think back to a MECHANICAL typewriter (Score:3, Informative)
On a mechanical typewriter, the levers were arranged in strict left-to-right order, ignoring the row.
That is, the actual order was 1QAZ2WSX3EDC4RFV... well you get the idea. Keys on the same row were four levers apart, much reducing the risk of jamming.
You can still find a few common letter combinations, but you should be looking up/down rather than left/right.
There's more to Dvorak than the two-handed layout (Score:5, Informative)
That said, it's really only good for English, which isn't an issue to me but would of course be for people who type more often in other languages.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
... WTF doesn't Slashdot understand UTF-8 input?
Editing (Score:5, Interesting)
I know that the Slashdot editing has a very low reputation around here but I was pretty interested to see how much work was done on this article writeup. You can see mine at the Firehose [slashdot.org] entry. The Slashdot editor even went to the trouble of looking up prior Dvorak-related articles (and taking the trouble to notice the article I submitted was 13 years old -- whoops)
OMG HaXX0r! (Score:5, Funny)
I know that the Slashdot editing has a very low reputation around here but I was pretty interested to see how much work was done on this article writeup. You can see mine at the Firehose entry. The Slashdot editor even went to the trouble of looking up prior Dvorak-related articles (and taking the trouble to notice the article I submitted was 13 years old -- whoops)
Wow, you're right. I'll fire off an email to Taco letting him know that kdawson's account has been hacked. That sort of compromise can't be tolerated, even if it's by a benevolent professional editor.
On Markets (Score:5, Insightful)
This article is the sort of crap that results in people talking about "market fundamentalists" and dismissing the very real benifits of decentralized decision making produced by healthy markets. The authors of this article missed three key points:
Healthy markets really are a good way to solve resource allocation problems and to make locally effective choices. They're probably even the best way. But saying that all markets always have optimal outcomes is absurd and results in people making the opposing absurd claim ("all markets are broken and need either heavy regulation or to be replaced with central planning") sound more reasonable.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I would add a Number 4 to that list:
4. Market stabilization has no consideration for the emotional and physical consequences of its activities.
Maybe your mother dieing is necessary for a particular market to stabilize. While the economic costs of her death would be negligible to the system the emotional costs may be too great for you. You may prefer the economic hit to the emotional hit.
This is a point that many anti-global warming dissenters miss. They will argue: "The world has been around for billions
Bias much? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's very much a pro-markets piece.
It's very much a pro-markets publication. While the arguments put forward rest on their own merits, it's safe to say that Reason Online -- whose masthead includes the slogan, "Free Minds and Free Markets" -- is certainly not going to publish articles that challenge the idea that the market is an efficient and rational actor, at least most of the time. Whether that inherent bias extends to cherry-picking the data used to reach conclusions, or whether the data is even unambiguous, are things one needs to consider in cases like this.
Probably everyone here can think of some examples of inferior products that have remained dominant despite the appearance of superior alternatives, and also examples of the reverse. For any of that to mean anything, one would have to survey a substantial sampling of such cases, determine which represented the majority and by what measure (total monetary value, units sold, etc.) and then look at all kinds of other factors (market segment, cost of switching products, and so on) before one could begin to draw useful and quite probably heavily qualified conclusions.
Then there's the inherent ambiguity involved in "superiority". Take Mac versus Windows versus Linux, for example. If, like most computer users, you have a preference, you can probably explain what drives that preference. But so can people who have different preferences. One might prefer Windows for reasons that are entirely irrelevant to a Mac aficionado, and vice versa. So which is superior? Obviously, there is no single, universal answer to this question -- and many others like it -- so we continue to see a market for Windows and a smaller, but quite healthy, market for Macs. Likewise, Harley-Davidson motorcycles continue to sell alongside everything from Vespa scooters to Honda racing bikes, and there are a dozen or more brands of sandwich bread at the average supermarket despite, what, more than six thousand years of not very exciting developments in bread technology.
The short version is that in any complex area of study riddled with exceptions and special cases, sweeping general conclusions are likely to be true, if at all, only within some arbitrary subset of cases that may be of very little predictive value, but that will seldom deter anyone with an article deadline and a point to "prove".
The problem solved by QWERTY makes faster typing. (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe that the typewriter jamming issue solved by QWERTY makes typists faster. It's not true that QWERTY is designed to slow typists down. QWERTY is designed to eliminate ``hazards'' in the machine's ``pipeline''.
We can in fact liken this to the execution of instructions on a processor.
The opponents of QWERTY say that its purpose is to bring about ``underclocking'', i.e. slowing down of the overall keystroke issue rate. But the technical issue is not speed, but collision between the hammers in the typewriter. The margin, or window of interference for adjacent hammers (corresponding to keys that are in adjacent columns of the keyboard) is worse than for keys that are horizontally distant.
There can be consider parallelism in the action of these hammers. Two keystrokes can be in progress at the same time, with one hammer slightly ahead of the other. One strikes the tape and paper, then recoils, and the other one lands in the same spot afterward. The farther apart the hammers are located, the closer together they can be temporally; i.e. the faster the typist can issue these keystrokes without causing a jam! I.e. the typist is encouraged to be faster, not to be slower.
But this spaced arrangement also makes it easier for the typist to go fast. Alternation between the hands leads to much more rapid typing. The typist can double the rate compared to using one hand. It's difficult to type a fast sequence with the fingers of one hand. This is particularly true of the weaker fingers: ring finger and pinky. Pianists struggle to get these into shape. Try playing a fast trill using your ring finger and pinky on a weighted piano keyboard, then try it with your thumb and index finger, then with two strong fingers from the opposite hand.
Also it takes energy to make the keys and hammers move, in a typewriter or piano. The typist can use gravity: the weight of his forearm from the elbow can act through a single finger to send power to the keystroke. If two or more keys have to be hit in rapid succession using the same hand, the energy of a single fall of the forearm has to be distributed across all three. C. C. Chang describes the concept of parallel sets and gravity attack principle in his Fundamentals of Piano Practice http://www.pianofundamentals.com/book [pianofundamentals.com].
When piano music contains a monophonic passage (one melody line), pianists take advantage of two-handed fingering to achieve greater virtuosity. Playing a melody with one hand is a difficult compromise for the sake of polyphony (e.g. Bach two-part invention with two independent melody lines often at the same tempo).
Also look at the African folk instrument known as the thumb piano. It's a resonant box with protruding, tuned metal reeds that are plucked with the thumbs. The scale is arranged such that you can play fast runs by hitting notes with alternate thumbs on opposite sides of the ``reedboard''. Virtuoso thumb piano players can shred blazingly fast over scale and arpeggio runs due to this left right alternation. You can see these guys in action in Bela Fleck's documentary film Throw Down Your Heart http://www.throwdownyourheart.com/ [throwdownyourheart.com]. It's hard to believe they are just using their thumbs.
Well, that concludes my typing rant. At least it's not about static versus dynamic typing, for once! :)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You are correct about the design principles behind QWERTY, but your metaphor for human efficiency is terrible. Human fingers are not hammers of a type writer, and do not behave similarly at all.
More importantly, you follow with principles of fast typing as if they support QWERTY over Dvorak, when in fact Dvorak is designed with all of these things in mind. The most commonly used letters are in the home row, but spaced such that the same hand rarely types multiple letters in a row. Meanwhile, with QWERTY, va
Also thwarted by changes in symbol frequencies (Score:5, Informative)
Its very difficult to compare as in typing speed measurements one will either be limited to different people as well as different keyboard layouts, or at least different amounts of exposure to each layout. And what about some control cases of randomly generated layouts or alphabetical layouts?
An interesting hypothesis to test would be that any keyboard layout might have similar typing speeds (say give a factor of 2 or so) once a user has enough experience with it - for things that can be typed with single key presses.
I _do_ have some personal experience with the (standard 2-hand) dvorak keyboard layout which anyone can try by selecting that layout in their OS's keyboard settings (irrespective of their physical keyboard), a side effect of this is that you will be forced to learn to touch-type as obviously the letters written on your standard keyboard will have no relation to what comes out on the screen any more!
Speaking entirely qualitatively - it was suprising how easy it was to learn, and a few times since I abandoned it I've gone back and found that it can be picked up again within an hour or two once learnt (just like riding a bike?). And as a few other posters have already mentioned (for typing normal English) it feels more comfortable as less finger movement is required on average.
However (and this is the reason I've abandoned using it) - the dvorak layout is inappropriate for most uses apart from simply typing English - such as computer programming, working with spreadsheets, linux command line usage etc.
This is because by arranging the characters by their frequency in standard english, many non-alphanumeric characters which are rarely used in standard english but now very frequently used for other tasks on a computer are placed in very awkard positions requiring you to type with the little finger (or even worse, shift + little-finger). Here are some examples
':' - used a lot in C++, is where shift-'z' is on qwerty.
'{' and '}' - are shift-'-' and shift-'=' on qwerty.
'\'' and '"' - are q and shift-'q' on qwerty.
Wrist ache (ahem) (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been using the dvorak layout for several years now and will say that:
1. Dvorak isn't necessarily faster than Qwerty.
I certainly used to be able to achieve faster typing speeds using Qwerty.
2. Dvorak is more comfortable.
I used to suffer periodic bouts of painful wrist and finger ache (no comments please!) when typing on a Qwerty layout. I switched to Dvorak and everything has been hunky dory since.
Judge for yourself with this app. (Score:3, Informative)
But try this app out: http://colemak.com/Compare [colemak.com]
It's a java app that let's you enter text and compare how far your fingers are traveling each time and other fun stats.
Dvorak (Score:3, Informative)
Having used Qwerty, then I switched to Dvorak for about a decade. Then I switched back about 4 years ago, so I feel qualified to talk more than most.
* Your fingers move a lot less under Dvorak. You can definitely tell.
* Because your fingers move less, you've got to be more careful about overdoing it and getting RSI. You need to lift your hands up more and do some exercises.
* I think Dvorak is definitely faster with less effort. Maybe Qwerty can be as fast (don't know) but you'll need a lot more training to get there.
* For general use as a programmer, it doesn't matter much. As a secretary typing big documents as quickly as possible its more likely to matter. But typing at the speed of your own thoughts it doesn't matter much.
* At the end of the day the reason I switched back was the annoyance of living in two worlds. If I'm at somebody else's computer with Qwerty, it was a pain. If somebody else came to my computer it was a pain. Yes, to some extent you can learn both, but basically living with both systems was more trouble than it was worth I think. If you don't have anyone else using Qwerty to deal with, it might be worth a go.
Reposting an old comment of mine (Score:4, Informative)
Dvorak is a more efficient layout, allowing a typist to type more words with less finger movement. The advantage has been quantified:
A few issues. (Score:3, Insightful)
1. This is not news -- to put it mildly.
2. As has been pointed out every time this comes up, the "research" isn't even CLOSE to addressing the real claims of Dvorak advocates. (Hint: Any test under about ten years isn't going to give you a fair comparison to "experienced" keyboard users...)
3. Furthermore, this also doesn't hint at issues related to RSI. I didn't switch to Dvorak because it was "faster" -- I switched because I was hurting my hands. Switching seemed to have helped, because my fingers moved in different patterns.
4. Why, oh why, is kdawson still able to post garbage like this? This is not news, it's not stuff that matters. It's a "debunking" over a decade old with major, blindingly-obvious, flaws. I don't even think this is the first time it's been on Slashdot in particular.
Can't we PLEASE get someone in who has actually read Slashdot before, and knows both what kind of material is suitable, and what's already been posted?
Proof by grep (Score:3, Interesting)
Assumption: alternating between left and right hand letters is fast and easy on the muscles (I think this has been found to be true, but I can't find the study)
$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -E "^([qwertasdfgzxcvb][yuiophjklnm])+\$" | wc -l
254
$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -E "^([pyaoeuiqjkx][fcgrldhtnsbmwvz])+\$" | wc -l
637
Conclusion: dvorak allows you to type 2-3 times as many words using the alternating hands technique
(Note: the regex is inexact, missing out words which start on the right hand side, or are an odd number of characters long; I leave a more complete regex as an excercise to the reader :-) )
Re:learning curves (Score:5, Funny)
clearly never played EVE-online
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was in college, having heard about the Dvorak layout, I decided to give it a shot. I switched my keyboard layout, applied some new letter stickers, and spent a couple weeks re-training myself to the new format. After about three months, I gave up and switched back, primarily for two reasons:
First, shortcut keys. The letter layout itself may be (arguably) more efficient, but the placement of shortcut keys is an overlay on top of that which has its own efficiently. Take Copy (Ctrl-C), Paste (Ctrl-V
Re:i like dvorak but stick with the standard qwert (Score:5, Interesting)
Dvorak ain't language agnostic, so for non-english languages it's worse.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not really, the keys are placed on a Dvorak keyboard based upon the frequency of use. Trying to balance it so that as much as possible you're not using the same finger for consecutive letters and often times not on the same hand. It's basically meant to be fast and efficient. Whether or not that's the case is a matter for consideration elsewhere.
And yes, that does depend a great deal upon the language, as just because you're talking about 21 different non-vowels, they're not necessarily optimally placed in
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
An example for consonant use of Y would be "Yacht", which means exactly what you think it does.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Y is a vowel in Swedish too. And it just like GP says about it being able to act as a vowel in German, it can act that way in english too, like in "why".
Re:i like dvorak but stick with the standard qwert (Score:4, Informative)
For comparison, in English the Y appears almost 500 times as often as in German (1.974% vs. 0.04% of the alphabet) whereas the Z is more common in German (1.13% vs. 0.074%).
The Dvorak layout simply doesn't work that well for non-English languages, hence localized (and even more obscure) layouts like NEO [neo-layout.org] have been created.
Re:i like dvorak but stick with the standard qwert (Score:5, Funny)
Italian doesn't have a 'y'? Well, at least Italy does.
Re:i like dvorak but stick with the standard qwert (Score:5, Funny)
But Italy is called Italia in Italy ;)
Re:i like dvorak but stick with the standard qwert (Score:4, Funny)
y?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, very mysterious.
Frequencies English:
y = 1.974%
z = 0.074%
Frequencies German:
y = 0.04%
z = 1.13%
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequencies [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The "Z" key in qwerty: pinky finger, lower row. The pinky finger is the least accurate and most quickly tired of the fingers.
The "Y" key in qwerty: index finger, one up and one over from the home keys. The index finger is the strongest and most accurate of the fingers.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There are language-specific variants of QWERTY too; QWERTZ for German, AZERTY for French, etc.
Is that like saying "bat" is a variant of the word "cat"?
No.
:)
Is this a typical Slashdot-type attempt to make a point and win an argument by bad analogy?! Answering that question properly would probably require more in-depth consideration of linguistics, word origins, meanings, etc. than you intended.
And it would still be a misleading and pointless analogy, so why bother?
I'd say those layouts aren't QWERTY; they're QWERTZ and AZERTY, respectively.
Say that if you want. :) Can't say I feel like getting into a long, pedantic and pointless argument about how one wants to classify them.
I consider them variants because (a) they're near-i
Re:i like dvorak but stick with the standard qwert (Score:5, Insightful)
That's as logical as saying it's a reptile specific food geared towards mammals. And about as true.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If one of my writing students had created that headline, I'd have flunked him.
"...claimed not superior to..."?
This is why techies who know how to write well are such a valued commodity.
But thanks for the interesting story. I tried dvorak in grad school and I had my doubts about it back then.
Re:Dvorak is better, but how much better? (Score:5, Informative)
Dvorak layout is based on far more than that. Dvorak looked at the relative frequencies of words, of letters, of 2 and 3 letter groups and used a few mechanical principles (keystrokes that alternate hands are faster, the 1st and 2nd fingers are stronger than the others, the right hand is stronger for right handed people, that moving up is easier than moving down, that consecutive strokes with the same finger are easier if the finger is tracking down etc.).
Dvorak layouts exist for many languages, and the left-handed layout is different to the right. There are also one handed Dvorak layouts for each hand for those who can't use the other hand. And it's a simple mathematical process to develop a Dvorak layout for any alphabetic language.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Optimizing layout for specific use would be cool. But having to re-learn the layout every time I encounter a new keyboard isn't.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The Dutch had a wrangled QWERTY-layout, but these days it is almost obsolete. Almost everyone has switched to the standard en_US variant.
Re:Dvorak is better, but how much better? (Score:5, Interesting)
I always read about how our QWERTY typewriters were designed to deliberately 'slow' you down. I even taught this to my classes of elementary and middle school students.
In my classes I tried to teach my young students (5th grade) to use the computer to enhance their regular school work. One day they came to class and told me that their homework was to find a sentence and count, how many a's, how many b's, etc. I delighted in teaching them to use a spreadsheet for this.
The next day my son came home from school and showed me the class totals. I was struck by an idea. I pulled out my Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing manual (in the days when they came with paper manuals) to compare the results of these 5th graders with the Dvorak keyboard. I was stunned, as they matched almost perfectly.
If young children without a bias come up with the same result, there is a rightness and a logic to it. Soon thereafter my son switched to Dvorak and after about a week was faster. He was even much faster another week later.
Soon thereafter, I used Mavis Beacon to learn the Dvorak keyboard while on a flight to Tokyo. I was typing fully in Dvorak by the end of that flight and never went back. Only rarely am I forced to type in QWERTY and on those occasions I have to look at the keys. I try to keep it out of my consciousness so as not to conflict with my use of Dvorak, and I have forgotten how to type fast in QWERTY.
The main benefit is that it feels so much better, as my fingers travel less. There is a lot less stress on my fingers. My fingers were starting to exhibit signs of pain and exhaustion when typing in QWERTY and that went away. Dvorak is much easier on the fingers.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The first mover effect is just another case of hysteresis induced by positive feedback. This is a very common phenomenon present in many physical and other systems; it is hardly a surprise that it would exist in economic systems as well. In the context of the economy, it is simply a reflection that sometimes any standard is better than no standard, even if that standard is absurd.
Re:Depends on the Language (Score:4, Informative)
For an example of a keyboard for a non-Latin alphabet, look at the alternate symbols on this Japanese keyboard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MacBookProJISKeyboard-1.jpg [wikipedia.org]
Re:Depends on the Language (Score:5, Funny)
For an example of a keyboard for a non-Latin alphabet, look at the alternate symbols on this Japanese keyboard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MacBookProJISKeyboard-1.jpg [wikipedia.org]
Obviously, that's not a real Japanese keyboard, because it's missing they keys for ^_^, o_O, and =3.
Re:Depends on the Language (Score:4, Interesting)
Use this Python script:
import sys, string
d=dict([(k,0) for k in string.lowercase])
for ch in sys.stdin.read():
if string.lower(ch) in string.lowercase:
d[string.lower(ch)] += 1
print sorted(d.items(), key=lambda x:x[1], reverse=True)
Usage:
$
This is a sample sentence in English.
I am typing this text to see which letters are used the most.
I will repeat this for other languages I speak.
EOF
[('e', 18), ('t', 14), ('s', 13), ('i', 12), ('a', 8), ('h', 8), ('l', 6), ('n', 6), ('r', 5), ('g', 4), ('o', 4), ('p', 4), ('m', 3), ('c', 2), ('u', 2), ('w', 2), ('d', 1), ('f', 1), ('k', 1), ('y', 1), ('x', 1), ('b', 0), ('j', 0), ('q', 0), ('v', 0), ('z', 0)]
Do a `wget|html2txt|countletters.py' with a few pages from Wikipedias in various languages and you'll have the answer.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No instead they looked at previously done and reported studies on the effects of training typists with it.
Which is about seven thousand times better than making up your own anecdote without a control group.
Everyone I've known who has spent time training on QWERTY has said they are as fast or faster at it then before too. Almost their entire point was that of course with training people get faster, that's why you need a control group who is trained for the same amount of time on QWERTY... And looking at the
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It took awhile, but I'm at the point now where the only place I really run into problems is games -- some don't let you change their mappings, and most are not written with alternate keymaps in mind.
WASD doesn't work very well when you're actually typing something like comma, A, semicolon, or H.
Solution: Learned it, got very proficient at everything except games, grudgingly change the mappings in games, and re-learned QWERTY at about 30-40 WPM so I'm not completely helpless when I borrow a computer.