Everyone has a keyboard. Letters 'Q', 'W', 'E', 'R', 'T' and 'Y' take the upper left corner in row of your keyboard and this is exactly the name of the most popular keyboard layout in the world now. For the most of newbies, who tries to master a touch-typing with QWERTY layout, it is the real pain to learn the method.

One more thing before we proceed:

• keyboard layout is the systematically layered key order;
• language layout is the key layout adopted as an optimal layout for a certain language.

It may seem obvious, but very often the people make mistakes and use the both terms interchangeably, which is not correct. Besides, keyboard layout refers to main or primary layout and language layout indicates ‘other’ language layout(s), if any.

A couple of facts:

• It was in 1714 in England, when Henry Mill patented his typewriter.
• Christopher Sholes patented his typewriter in the States in 1867.

Of course, the facts stated above are related to English only, and it happened that English was the first language put on the typewriter keyboard. Since then it is almost a tradition to stick English ABC onto keys of any language layout keyboard, and it does not matter what is your native language at all. For programmers it is usual to type many things in English and that is why they got used to it from the beginning of their careers.

However, the main question about the QWERTY layout stays the same: is it the most comfortable way to layout the typing keys, or not? There are few opinions out there stating antipodal approaches:

• QWERTY is a burden
• QWERTY is not as good as direct ABCDEF layout
• QWERTY was invented as ABCDEF layout let jamming the keys
• Neither QWERTY nor ABCDEF are optimal keyboard layouts

Everything about typing is getting more and more competitors today: we have already voice-to-speech, OCR and text-to-speech technologies. Despite numerous publications that touch-typing as a text input method or control method is getting outdated, it remains the most popular and the most reliable way of human-computer interaction.

Also it is very difficult to say for sure if any alternative input method was a marketing trick, or was a will to help the people with limited abilities? After all, if you have to be a confident touch-typist you may start with any language layout and with any keyboard layout.