I have 104 keys on my keyboard and 4 of them are modifiers. The English alphabet isn't the Latin/Greek alphabet either. And I am absolutely astounded that Russians apparently have never invented the concept of an abbreviation or contraction.

One does wonder how soviets ever managed to program their computers.

As an aside, if you (the reader, not Avshalom) haven't read much Russian literature, Russian is the language where you take the first syllable of every word in a long phrase and you make a new word:

Министерство здравоохранения => Минздрав (Ministry of Health => Minheal)

Министерство юстиции => Минюст (Ministry of Justice => Minjust)

etc, etc. As a foreigner, I found that quite peculiar though it doesn't seem to be as common now as it was before but it's still noticeable in everyday life.

Ah, so that's where that came from in 1984. It all makes sense.

Yes, it is indeed inspired by that.

...and nowadays in the US: HomeSec

Don't worry it seems peculiar even for native like me :-) It's a bit less common now as it feels like Soviet era attribute (think Orwell's новояз (newspeak))

> I have 104 keys on my keyboard and 4 of them are modifiers.

Yep, that's one way. But it make things harder. If you set up Alt to use as English layout modifier to type {} you need to press two modifiers now: Alt + Shift. However I agree it's not the main issue.

> The English alphabet isn't the Latin/Greek alphabet either.

At least it's Latin.

> And I am absolutely astounded that Russians apparently have never invented the concept of an abbreviation or contraction.

Of course such things do exist.. they just don't work very well. English's short words is a relatively distinctive feature which it has developed being a mix of Latin/French/Germanic. For Russian words usually are complex. Var - переменная - prefix пере- + root мен. Yes, you can contract it to `перем.` But it also sounds like contraction of `перемещенная` which is `moved` or `перемещать` which is `move` or `переменный’ which is `variable(meaning: alternating)` and so forth.

Sorry, but the thing about the layout is BS. I code with a german layout. You have the use the Alt-Gr modifier a lot, but in the end it's not harder to use than a shift key.

You may call my opinion BS but it is harder due to the fact that additional letters take space off the symbols. Examples (assuming you use AltGr)

    Symbol; English; Russian
    , ; , ; Shift + .
    [ ; [ ; AltGr + х
    { ; Shift + [ ; AltGr + Shift + х

See pattern? Though I agree with you - it's not a dealbreaker.

Ok, two modifiers are proably more annoying. Is the Alt-Gr plane not big enough? I have serveral Symbols there that i never ever need, like ðæł¶ŧ←↓→øħħ̣ĸ . Are there essential Cyrillic characters?

No, altgr basically is not used while I still use it to have Russian over Ukrainian which has just few different letters іы їъ єэ ґ:-D

I could set up a lot of symbols though altgt but they won't mostly much English layout. But I don't need to because languages I program in are English based.

If I knew German, I would use exclusively German layout as apparently you do. But I need actually 4: En, Eo(that not much but still), Uk, Ru - those two every day. So I contracted it to 2: Latin/Cyrillic. :)

There's a world of difference between German layout (with only a few extra letters) and Cyrillic layout (which completely replaces Latin letters).

And yet there's a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1C:Enterprise being a leading software suite in Russia. It's source code terrifies me every time.

Indeed. The one thing worse then programming with Excel formulas.