Yes, they are symbols that are used in many programming languages. No, it's not reasonable to assume that they are easy to type for all of us.
Anybody who deviates from that is doing so at their own risk. If you want to use Dvorak or Azerty instead of Qwerty then you can do that, it's just not advisable because things like Vim will no longer make sense.
If you try to write code using a layout that doesn't have all the ascii printable symbol characters in accessible locations then you're creating a special kind of hell for yourself. It takes like 30 seconds to change to US layout.
That’s not reasonable at all. You have way more people writing code outside of the US than within. The US layout may be the most represented one, I don’t know statistics on this, but I would expect it to be on the losing side when comparing US layout vs non-US layout.
Though I would agree that having access to ASCII is something you need, but any standardized keyboard layout in the world can do that via modifiers, if not directly.
The only alternatives would be to converge on a lowest common demoninator, and have a likely more inconvenient syntax for all parties, or to diverge into regional-specific dialects, which unicode shows to be.. wide.. and generally make code sharing much harder.
This is really more of a "many mostly equivalent solutions, but one needs to be picked" scenario -- and it would be time poorly spent trying to undo the incumbent solution (and will naturally be rendered untenable by endless bike-shedding anyways). The worst of all solutions -- except for all the others
Using a German layout is very much a choice you have made and is no reason for you to demand that programming languages should make everyone else's life harder to acomodate those choices. Even for German text input, umlauts and sz are rare enough that it is not much of a hindrance to have to enter those via dead keys or compose sequences on a layout that doesn't make {} and [] a pain to type.
I really don't think most people use the American layout. That's just typical america-centric narcissism.
Curly brackets etc use hand-twisting alt-gr combinations on a Swedish layout so I’d be better off using a US keyboard mapping so I can type ([{ using only shift. I have tried and failed to make that switch. It would probably just slow me down for a month or so before it made me faster, but I’ll keep pushing my square-wheeled cart thank you.
External keyboards, sure. But many of us are laptop-only.
Sure, you can remap the keys, but also, not everyone is a touch typist.
There's no English keyboard.
Writing French with the US international layout is actually pretty easy.
The umlaut is a dead key so it's very easy. ß is AltGr or Option + S which I admit is a bit more annoying, but your spellchecker should take care of that, no? (I'm Swiss so even when I have to type in broken German, we don't use the ß here).
All layouts are tradeoffs. Not using the US layout makes a lot of things annoying in our field. I write code and use my IDE's keyboard shortcuts more than I need to write long texts in my native language.
I've switched to US intl 15 years ago and I don't type in French any slower than I used to. On the other hand I benefit greatly from using the default layout in our very US-centric field.
So " is Shift+' and @ is shift+2
In UK keyboard layout, @ is shift+', and " is shift+2 (which is what is shown on my keyboard keys).
My favorite keyboard is British up to the point of me specifically picking a laptop/physical keyboard with a British layout.
Just learn both and you'll be OK.
The thing with touch-typing is that you don't think so you have to go through a period of discomfort.
Everywhere else, it's reasonable to assume that if you're a programmer, you speak English and likely have an English keyboard. This may not be fair, but it is the state of affairs.
You likely own a US keyboard not only for the parentheses problem, but because of all sorts of English isms throughout all code -- alphanumerics, urls, etc are all in Latin script. It's like German in the field of mathematics in the 19th century.