Dvorak, Smalltalk, and my own delirious Pyschobabble (OT)

Joshua Marker joshua at qcsf.com
Tue Feb 22 18:01:25 UTC 2000


>> wife switched at the same time as me.  
>> She hardly even remembers Qwerty now.
>
>This is perhaps the reason I never even attempted to learn the Dvorak
>keyboard.
>
>
>Any technology which might cause me to forget the more popular technologies,
>or which might warp my brain into a shape that is no longer commercially
>relevant would hurt my career.

	Oh, you mean like Squeak Smalltalk? ;-)

>Even if my home PC and work PC have it, where to you get a laptop with
>Dvorak? How about a Windows CE H/PC with Dvorak?  How about when you have to
>use someone else's computer or help a friend who has a computer problem!?

	Actually, both Win & MacOS come with Dvorak keyboards in the latest versions of the OS (have for a while). So do most UNIXes. You need not have a hardware keyboard; simply change the keyboard driver. 

>you cannot change it. You can morph it slightly [such as the 

	Can't change it? While I don't think Dvorak is going to take over any time soon, consider French in Russia in the nineteenth century - or english, anywhere, anytime. 

>Furthermore, is Smalltalk itself a danger to my brain?

	Only in the sense that it's dangerously out of the mainstream.

	Dvorak saved my wrists, and lets me type more quickly than I ever did. When I end up at a machine that doesn't have dvorak, I turn it on (if it's a mac or a pc) or just type in qwerty - It takes about five minutes to get back to QWERTY. (the intervening five can be interesting, though; my name (joshua) is 'hrodga' on many, many login screens....)





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