Also because the special characters were (and are) difficult to type on European keyboards.
Characters like []{}\|~ are behind multi-finger access and often not printed at all on the physical keys (at least in the past). You can see how this adds a hurdle to writing C…
Pascal was designed by a European, so he preferred keywords which could be typed on every international keyboard. C basically just used every symbol from 7-bit ASCII that happened to be on the keyboards in Bell Labs.
Just as example, on my slovenian QWERTZ layout: [ - altgr+f, ] - altgr+g, { - altgr+b, } - altgr+n, \ - altgr+q, | - altgr+w, ~ - altgr+1.
You get used to them, though you start feeling like a pianist after a short coding session. The one most annoying for me are the fancy javascript/typescript quotes, which I have to use all too often: ` - altgr+7.
I tried switching to US a few times, but every time muscle memory made me give up soonish - especially since there are big benefits to using same keyboard layout as other people in your office are using.
Also practically everytime I need to write a comment, commit message or email I need my č, š and ž. It's kinda nice to have them only a single keypress away.
I'm from a non-English country. I only ever use layout of my locale when I write in my language. That's how it was ever since I was a kid who knew little English. And that's how all computers I've encountered in my country are set up - English first, local second.
In addition, our layout, overwrites only the numerics – all other symbols are the same as on a US layout.
There’s so many assumptions here about a person who’s starting to learn programming.
For starters, that they’re on Linux, they feel comfortable running complex CLI commands, they can memorize the U.S. layout just like that, and that they can type without looking at the physical keys (because changing the virtual mapping means keys produce something else than what the label says).
In reality, the learner’s first exposure to C family languages is more likely to be a website where you can run some JavaScript in a text box. And the first hurdle is to figure out how to even type {}. American developers just completely forget about that.
I’ve been writing C and its progeny (C++, JavaScript, Rust etc.) since 1990 on a Finnish keyboard.
The AltGr brackets are fine. The truly annoying character to type is the backtick (which is a quite new addition to the pantheon of special characters, C doesn’t use it).
My personal opinion is that Niklaus Wirth had the better overall ideas about clarity and inclusiveness in programming language design, but that battle is long lost. (What you consider the character set needed for "proper programming" is really a relatively new development, mid-1990s and later.)
Backticks were fairly important for shell scripting in the past, but have officially been replaced with $(), which can be nested.
My intuition is that Perl would be the most challenging on a keyboard where it's harder to type unusual punctuation, since it feels like a very punctuation-heavy language, but I don't know whether it actually uses more than C (I think the backtick has a shell-style meaning in Perl too).
Well unless opting for something like Dvorak, you are indeed doomed to something that was specificcaly designed to please typewriter mechanical constraints without much care for the resulting ergonomics.
I use a Bépo layout personally, on a Typematrix 2030 most of the time, as French is my native language.
or maybe popular proglangs were designed for writing on USAn press/office keyboards – remember that UNIX came to be as a typesetting appliance — disregarding anyone else.
Spectacular?? Terrifying. If I need to type non-ASCII Latin characters I'll just use compose sequences. The thought of a non-U.S. keyboard layout with modifiers required to type []{}<> and so on is terrifying.
I think in Europe C was not as common as other languages at the time so the terseness looked odd.