+1. On German keyboards for example, the backtick is on a dead key, meaning that it is only printed if you press the spacebar afterwards. Thanks to dead keys, you can e.g. get "é" by typing <´> <e>. But it is a severe annoyance if you actually want to get "`" (<Shift>+<´>, <Space>).

I switched to using a compose key instead of dead keys, because I just end up writing much more code (and english) anyway, so it's more efficient than actually having dead keys in the end.

I'm glad I switched to Colemak way before having to type german umlauts, so I had to learn a few easy combos and keep the rest of the layout unchanged.

I always use the nodeadkeys variants and use compose key to get characters that I don't have on my keyboard, which is many more that the stupid deadkey allows for.

I anticipated that use of backquote might not be popular, but this particular case was unknown to me.

The decision actually arises from avoiding using both single and double quotes for quoting (http://prog21.dadgum.com/172.html), so I just copied golang's string literal syntax.