Twas largely a joke. OTOH, there are some specific differences between the US and UK layout where the US layout is better, and I can't think of any where it's worse. Specificly, ' and " being on the same key makes sense -- on the UK layout, they're on oppisite ends of the keyboard (' is the same place as US; " is shift-2). Really, though, there are major ways for keyboards to be better or worse for specific tasks -- keyboards that make {}, [], <>, or \ difficult to type are very bad for perl. The differences between US and UK are minor enough that it's probably best in most cases to stick to the one that you know best. In my case, that's US; in castaway's case, that's UK. In your case, it's probably even, so just pick one. So long as it doesn't hurt to type perl in, like the German layout was for me, then it's probably OK for you.