...
hence why as a young programmer the best ever present I got from my mother was a US layout keyboard, and never looked back. With AltGr deadkeys I can even write things that are Italian, like "È", but cannot be done on an Italian keyboard (there is no such letter on the keyboard, and one has to rely on the word processing sofware to properly capitalise it if "è" comes after an end of sentence).
Italian keyboards are shit for writing Italian, _and_ for programming.
On Linux, quite comfortably, thanks to the power of Alt modifiers (which I first got acquainted with on the Amiga), tilde is just Alt+"ì". BTW I don't have to recall ASCII codes of accented characters or leave the keyboard unless I have to type some really odd ones. I just type Alt+<accent symbol>. Thus I can type foreign words like Åland or Khazad-dûm in a fraction of a second with ease from the comfort of my keyboard...
Würstels, crême caramel... È facile. Yes "È". Italian users on Windows always have issues typing uppercase accented characters... you can easily spot Italian Linux users by their uppercase text: PERCHÈ È COSÌ FACILE? Most (Windows) users will instead type: PERCHè è COSì. The most intrepid ones might even resort to "'" - PERCHE' E' COSI'. So sad.
My ~2 cents.
Update: Looking into non-us keyboards, this is way less convenient. Italian keyboards don’t even have a tilde? How do they program?