Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes • Hacker News Board

Re: Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

#51

Post by tadfisher » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 4:20 PM UTC

duck wrote: post #44

Whitespace hasn’t been taken into consideration (tabs and spaces) which would have been a cool thing to see. I think if that was included this would be a lot more useful. Is there a reason it wasn't?

Different editors take different amounts of effort to insert whitespace.

Re: Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

#52

Post by jholman » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 4:24 PM UTC

robert_nsu wrote: post #13

I looked at the heatmaps, then looked at my keyboard. The keys with rubbed out labels nearly match his findings 100%. My 'N' isn't (only because the key is slightly larger than my other keys). Other than that, he is spot on.

Interesting thought about the labels. Mine mostly do not match.

In fact, on my keyboard, N is the most-obliterated key label, followed by MAD<. Also damaged: GHSECV. I think I can blame ASD on games, and E should be obvious. So why are CVNM< so very heavily worn? My best guess is that the labels are on the upper section of the keys, which is presumably the laziest part of the key for my fingers to reach?

Re: Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

#53

Post by camtarn » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 4:32 PM UTC

jevinskie wrote: post #49

robert_nsu wrote: post #13

I looked at the heatmaps, then looked at my keyboard. The keys with rubbed out labels nearly match his findings 100%. My 'N' isn't (only because the key is slightly larger than my other keys). Other than that, he is spot on.

I'm curious, why do you have a large N key?

Ergonomic style split keyboard, I'm guessing?

http://www.compkeyboard.com/uploadpic/Microsoft%20Natural%20...

Re: Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

#54

Post by jemfinch » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 4:38 PM UTC

This really needs to take into account modifier keys (in particular, shift).

Re: Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

#55

Post by michaelcampbell » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 4:55 PM UTC

tomh- wrote: post #12

Lisp: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2196687/lisp-keystrokes.png

The "-" key isn't even lukewarm which seems odd to me given what little I know about lisp.

Re: Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

#56

Post by bfung » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 5:03 PM UTC

Of course there's also the missing shortcut keys. For example, Java projects using an IDE would probably have crtl-space be the most frequently pressed keys (autocomplete).

Re: Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

#57

Post by jcizzle » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 5:11 PM UTC

zyb09 wrote: post #6

Clearly ObjC programmers are the only ones, who comment their code responsibly.

I imagine this comes from the fact that: 1. ObjC is only used on Apple's platforms (and the less popular GNUStep). 2. You'll have to use Xcode to write for these platforms (less popular alternatives don't add up here). 3. Xcode automatically inserts 7 lines of comments with // at the top of every file. Two files per class, 28 /'s per class.

Re: Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

#58

Post by KirinDave » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 5:14 PM UTC

michaelcampbell wrote: post #55

tomh- wrote: post #12

Lisp: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2196687/lisp-keystrokes.png

The "-" key isn't even lukewarm which seems odd to me given what little I know about lisp.

I thought that to, until I saw the note saying Paul Graham wrote it. Arc is noticeably terse, and avoids the use of - key wherever possible.

Re: Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

#59

Post by pyre » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 5:15 PM UTC

delinka wrote: post #17

wccrawford wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this reason, I think it would have been more interesting to ignore the alphabet keys and just heatmap the rest.

But then you lose the impact of the entire set of reserved words. At the point of ignoring the entire alphabet, you're looking at developer preferences for spacing and operators. Might be a nice sidebar to the existing heat maps.

  > you're looking at developer preferences for spacing
  > and operators

Not really. For example, in languages that use $ (e.g. Perl, PHP) to denote a variable, that's not developer preference. I'm actually surprised that there aren't more operators being used in Ruby. Though I'm not a Ruby programmer, it does not look as devoid of punctuation characters as the heatmap suggests.

Re: Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

#60

Post by mmariani » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 5:20 PM UTC

fullmoon wrote: post #15

zyb09 wrote: post #6

Clearly ObjC programmers are the only ones, who comment their code responsibly.

(or have to ;) )

If you code responsibly in ObjC there's no need to write comments. Therefore, if someone "has to" comment ObjC code there's something wrong with their practices.

The same holds for almost any language, but in ObjC that's just natural.