this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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He's not completely, though. @marcos had it right about co-evolution -- leaving aside any issues of internationalization, the layout of letters came from typewriters, but the layout of punctuation available was different on different computers for a lot of the early history of programming. Some of the more extreme examples were the Space Cadet Keyboard used at MIT, and APL which more or less required you to use an APL-specific keyboard in order to be able to access all the special symbols that are part of APL. Here's an APL program:
Things became much more standardized when the IBM PC's keyboard became the norm, and were formalized in 1995 with ISO 9995. Then once it stabilized there was a strong incentive for both language designers and keyboard makers to stick with what everyone was used to so they could keep working with the other. But it wasn't always that way.
Edit: Here's what things looked like on an IBM 3276:
(Full size image)