This article boils down to "Dvorak was difficult for me to learn therefore nobody should learn it."
I've been using Dvorak for about seven years now, and personally I love it.
For the longest time, I typed on QWERTY using a glorified hunt-and-peck method. I could type decently fast, but speed aside, I knew that touch typing was something I needed to learn. Figure if I was going to learn, I might as well learn on Dvorak.
Extremely happy with that decision. Typing just feels natural now, and I can type fast enough. There's many people that type faster than I do -- both QWERTY and Dvorak -- but I don't think I've ever thought to myself "I really wish I could type faster."
The biggest challenge for me in learning Dvorak was after I had more or less "learned" the layout, there was a period where typing was still involved consciously thinking "move this finger to this key". Most of my mental effort at that point was spent thinking about where to move my fingers, which made it more difficult to think about the actual code I was writing. Moved past that phase after a few weeks and never looked back. Overall, it took about month to learn, and it wasn't too difficult.
The author also mentions challenges when using someone else's computer. For me that's been a mild annoyance at worst--not enough of an annoyance to be worth complaining about. And on Mac OS at least, it takes all of a few seconds to switch keyboard layouts.
I've been using Dvorak for about seven years now, and personally I love it.
For the longest time, I typed on QWERTY using a glorified hunt-and-peck method. I could type decently fast, but speed aside, I knew that touch typing was something I needed to learn. Figure if I was going to learn, I might as well learn on Dvorak.
Extremely happy with that decision. Typing just feels natural now, and I can type fast enough. There's many people that type faster than I do -- both QWERTY and Dvorak -- but I don't think I've ever thought to myself "I really wish I could type faster."
The biggest challenge for me in learning Dvorak was after I had more or less "learned" the layout, there was a period where typing was still involved consciously thinking "move this finger to this key". Most of my mental effort at that point was spent thinking about where to move my fingers, which made it more difficult to think about the actual code I was writing. Moved past that phase after a few weeks and never looked back. Overall, it took about month to learn, and it wasn't too difficult.
The author also mentions challenges when using someone else's computer. For me that's been a mild annoyance at worst--not enough of an annoyance to be worth complaining about. And on Mac OS at least, it takes all of a few seconds to switch keyboard layouts.