When comparing AZERTY vs BÉPO, the Slant community recommends AZERTY for most people. In the question“What are the best keyboard layouts for programming?” AZERTY is ranked 18th while BÉPO is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose AZERTY is:
Most of us learned to type with this kind of keyboard, switching can be hard, and impractical to type French.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Nearly unavoidable for French people
Most of us learned to type with this kind of keyboard, switching can be hard, and impractical to type French.
Pro HJKL intact for vim
Vim programmers are going to want their navigation keys to relate to each other in a sensible fashion. QWERTY and azerty seem to be the only games in town for this
Cons
Con Bad for programming
But you get used to it... :-)
Characters very common in programming languages, like [] {} ~#|`@ are reachable only via the infamous AltGr key on Windows computers (and perhaps Linux ones; not sure for Macs).
With practice, you type them without thinking, but it is still a rather impractical gymnastics.