> Must be annoying to have to press shift to get those symbol chars while you're coding, eh?

Honestly no. It's all muscle memory for me, I don't think about it any more than I think about typing capital letters.

I think it's french keyboards that are like that by default. Symbols are the default and you have to press the Shift-key to get numbers.

Yeah, and some people complain that they have to use shift to get numbers.

I just think people will criticise their local layout no matter what. I use both a French AZERTY and a Québec QWERTY everyday (at work/home) and I think they are simply equally good for both typing French and for coding. The Québec keyboard (maybe actually Canadian multilingual or something) might have an edge because it more easily allows typing accented letters in uppercase, but on the other hand it doesn't let me type the € sign, so...