I've heard of this before. Do you have to hit some sort of modifier to get them? Does that not make indexing arrays extremely annoying, or is it really not that big a deal?
To be fair, () are more common than [] in most programming languages, and you need modifier keys to get () for most keyboard locales. Yet not many people complain about ().
In the German Mac keyboard layout, brackets [ ] and curly braces { } need the ALT modifier. “[” is ALT + 5, “]” is ALT + 6. You get used to it. With smart editors, writing “[” automatically creates its counterpart “]”, same for curly braces, so the typing effort is kept within limits.
(I have never used a US keyboard layout. Maybe typing programming symbols could be so much easier and I have never experienced it.)
I don't think it's a huge difference. Both () and {} require shift modifiers on US layouts, and they are both used extensively in most programming languages, far more than [] and nobody seems to complain.
Actually, there is, because indexing elements in arrays is a fairly common operation and when I use a US layout, it's so much easier. In fact, a lot of the contortions we have on EU keyboards are a pain to go back to once you've gotten used to a US layout, because there are decades of lore and history around US-layout TTYs that influenced programming language designs.
I've been touch typing on Programmer Dvorak for more than a decade. If you type programming symbols all day long it's unbeatable: http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/
It's annoying as hell. {} is even worse though, shift-alt-8/9 iirc (I've moved to a US layout years ago precisely because of this, and haven't looked back)
