Bill Horne wrote: | On Wed, 2011-01-19 at 22:14 -0500, Ben Eisenbraun wrote: | > On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 09:21:52PM -0500, Bill Horne wrote: | > > On Wed, 2011-01-19 at 15:30 -0500, Ben Eisenbraun wrote: | > > > For home I think I'll buy the one with key inscriptions, | > > > since it'll be tough for the 3 year old to use otherwise. | > > | > > I recommend Dvorak for all children learning to type. | > | > Oh no. He's definitely going to be a vi user. :-) | > | > I thought they decided the Dvorak advantage was a myth? | | I hadn't heard that: please cite the study that proved it. | | ISTM that the advantage of Dvorak is so fundamental that it can't be | overcome; the most-often used keys are closer to the home row. It's not | something that seems debatable to me: shorter distance means less finger | travel, ergo more speed. | | Then again, I've been wrong before, so I'd like to look at the data.
What I've got from reading the criticisms is that basically there isn't much data. What there is has some obvious problems, such as coming from people with a financial interest in convincing us that the Dvorak keyboard is faster than QWERTY. That is, the claim isn't that QWERTY is actually faster than Dvorak. The claim is that there's no credible scientific study showing that there's any difference. There might well be, but marketing campaigns aren't a good place to look for the evidence. If you want scientific evidence, you'll have to make it yourself. A few organizations with no financial interests in the outcome have tried to do this, and came up empty handed. But this hasn't been done too often, because funding and research organizations have much more important questions to spend their money on. I was a bit curious, when I first read about this, how there could be a financial interest in a keyboard layout. But it does turn out that the Dvorak layout was patented back in the 1920s and 1930s, and at that time you couldn't switch layouts by just changing a setting. The layout was "hard wired" into the typewriter mechanism, so to use a different layout, you had to buy a typewriter that had the new layout. Nowadays, when keyboards just send a digital keycode, it's easy to invent new keyboard layouts and experiment with them, but this wasn't possible back then, so there was money to be made if you could market a new layout. It seems reasonable that putting the common (in English) keys in the home row would lead to faster typing. But saying this doesn't make it true. If it's true, why has it turned out to be difficult to demonstrate scientifically? (Actually, that's an easy question to answer: When people are dying of cancer, heart disease, malaria and AIDS by the millions, why would we spend our limited human and financial resources studying something so inconsequential as a keyboard layout? So only people with an interest in the Dvorak layout have a motive to study the topic. ;-) -- _' O <:#/> John Chambers + <j...@trillian.mit.edu> /#\ <jc1...@gmail.com> | | _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
