The decision to write something with backticks or the pipe operator seemed to be a matter of personal taste, and I like a system where these less-important decisions are already made.
Only two of my main gripes: How come there's a whole key dedicated to superscript 2 and superscript 3? How many times a year does one use the key that's dedicated to the Greek letter Mu and the £ sign?
If we're lacking a key for `, howbout we change the ù key into it, given ù is used only in a single word in the whole language?
I agree the AZERTY layout sucks. But it's not alone in its messiness, even QWERTY's (un-) design continues to raise questions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#History
> "I for one would make no design decisions at all taking French AZERTY as a consideration."
Let me expand that statement: you are a craftsman who refuses to adjust his product to a piece of infrastructure that will at worst never budge, at best evolve conservatively and regardless of what you think, hurting your users/customers and bringing you nothing but some pride of not stepping over a self-imposed line in the sand.
Don't you think that's unrealistic and a bit sad? Have you seen many US roadsign makers refuse to build mph signs and print km/h signs instead because metric is better than imperial?
The cost for people on AZERTY to just get a nice QWERTY layout, individually, is very small, and can be implemented on a personal level.
Units of measure have to be, more often than not, coördinated among multiple people, which increases the costs of migrating between them, making it less favorable.
I'd be a craftsman refusing to adjust my product in a way that benefits an extremely small subset of my users (people on a French keyboard) and worsens the experience of a major subset of my target audience (people on a keyboard with ` that have prior experience with this syntax).
Let's put it this way: If a programming language required the letter ù in its syntax, which being present on a French keyboard but not on most others, represents the inverse of the current situation, my advice would be different.
The x-prime looked like the elm equivalent of mysql_real_escape from PHP.
I've only been using the pipe syntax and this makes things simpler; backticks are special syntax, pipe syntax is just another function.