[HN Gopher] Why is the 0 next to 9, not next to 1?
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Why is the 0 next to 9, not next to 1?
Author : amadeuspagel
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-04-25 20:13 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ux.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ux.stackexchange.com)
| orev wrote:
| I appreciate seeing the history of keyboard evolution, and I can
| see those points as being valid. However, it cannot be overlooked
| that the simple fact is people start counting with the number
| "1", so it's perfectly reasonable that that's why the first digit
| is "1" (and why zero-indexed arrays cause so many off by one
| errors). And the 0 at the end is the logical place for 0 as a
| stand-in for "10", since in normal counting you wouldn't need a 0
| until you go past 9, onward to 10.
|
| I appreciate that things like Benford's law exist, but I don't
| really buy into the idea that people put that much thought into
| it, when the more obvious answer is simply: "the first number is
| 1".
|
| QWERTY wasn't designed because of some deep academic analysis of
| typing patterns -- it was just to spread out frequently used
| letters so the mechanical arms didn't get jammed.
|
| It's nice to think that all the standards we have today are a
| result of some deep thought, A/B testing, and a full committee
| review and approval of the design, but in reality it's most often
| just what happened to work "well enough" at the time (evolution
| instead of intelligent design).
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _when the more obvious answer is simply: "the first number is
| 1"._
|
| This doesn't really hold if you see that 0 was to the right of
| 9 when the first number was 2, not 1.
| tremon wrote:
| The 0 key I use the most on my keyboard is next to 1 and 2, and
| farthest from the 9 key. I wonder if that has grown naturally to
| me because of tohster's explanation in his reply:
|
| _Benford 's law shows that the lower digits are much more
| frequently used than higher digits [..] If the 0 key were next to
| the 1 key, many numbers would be faster to type with just one
| hand
|
| It's for this reason that dedicated numerical keypads place the
| 0, 1, 2 and 3 keys in close proximity: users can rest their
| fingers on these most-frequently-used digits and enter data more
| quickly._
| NemuriBaku wrote:
| This reminds me of the issue of clocks starting at 12 instead of
| 0.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| The better question is why is 0 next to O. How many programming
| bugs have resulted in 0 and O being so close together on the
| keyboard.
| yakubin wrote:
| Probably 0. :)
|
| How often do you see a variable named "O"?
| techbio wrote:
| "To tell them apart", a former coworker used the variables
| named: style1 stylei
| stylel
|
| Ironically, they were still there for some time after I'd
| left.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I'm reminded of the brilliant _How To Write Unmaintainable
| Code_.
|
| https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code
| rvieira wrote:
| I think you meant "probably O"
| JadeNB wrote:
| It is a real optimist who thinks that the obviously wrong
| thing to do in code has never been done, or even that it's
| not the most commonly done thing.
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