I'm currently transitioning to a (German) dvorak variant - I'm about 2 weeks in and pretty happy with my typing speed. (I was never as fast as most programmers seem to be to begin with, 50-60 wpm) The reason I've switched though is recurring wrist pain. I've got all the ergonomic gear, but programming on QWERTY/QWERTZ is just plain bad. I've actually modified the layout slightly: specifically, I've mapped caps lock to be a left 'Alt Gr' key, and mapped [({<>})] to Alt-gr+homerow. All in all, hand travel is noticeably reduced.