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