This article originally appeard on Mahdi Yusuf’s blog. It was originally titled Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes.


7th September, 2011

I switch between programming languages quite a bit; I often wondered what happens when having to deal with the different syntaxes, does the syntax allow you to be more expressive or faster at coding in one language or another. I dont really know about that; but what I do know what keys are pressed when writing with different programming languages.

This might be something interesting for people who are deciding to select a programming language might look into, here is a post on the answer to the aged question of: Which programming language should I learn?

As far as I can tell languages with a wider focused spread across the keyboard are usually syntaxes we usually associate with ugly languages (ugly to read and code). ex. shell and perl.

You might argue that the variables names being used will alter the results, but as most languages programming have conventions for naming but we can assume a decent spread for variable names. I don’t offer conclusions, just poorly layout the facts. Although the heat map does miss out on things like shift and caps. ex. in perl with the dollar sign. ($)

Whitespace hasn’t been taken into consideration (tabs and spaces) which would have been a cool thing to see. 

The data that was used to gather this information was spread amongst various popular Github projects.

Javascript

Shell

Java

C

C++

Ruby

Python

PHP

Perl

ObjC

Lisp

Lisp code here was written by Paul Graham.

References

  1. heatmap.js http://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/heatmap-keyboard/

Published by Geoffrey Liu

A software engineer by trade and a classical musician at heart. Currently a software engineer at Groupon getting into iOS mobile development. Recently graduated from the University of Washington, with a degree in Computer Science and a minor in Music. Web development has been my passion for many years. I am also greatly interested in UI/UX design, teaching, cooking, biking, and collecting posters.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.