4 ms·

I skimmed comments here and couldn't find anything that talks about why e is so popular? Is it because ETAOIN? Because almost no "{" "}" pressed in C/Java. Almo

• orangeduck 14y ago
  Because it is the most common letter in English and used for variable and identifier names.
• k-mcgrady 14y ago
  I found the Objective-C one strange too. I would have thought '[' and ']' would have been two of the most pressed keys. I only really use '/' for commenting.
  • dan1234 14y ago
    I do type a lot more square brackets in ObjC than any other language, but I find that I type a lot more generally due to the increased length of many method names in ObjC (or I would do if autocomplete didn't do it for me). (Simple) Example: PHP: $myString = sprintf('Total: %.2f', $myFloat); ObjC: NSString *myString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Total: %.2f", myFloat]; Maybe this is the reason these characters don't score too highly in overall frequency? I have no answer for the high frequency of '/'.
    • k-mcgrady 14y ago
      That's a good point. Regarding the '/' I'm betting the code sample was very well commented.
      • alpb 14y ago
        I bet the code sample was from Apple's demo projects so there were like 100 lines of licensing/copyright at the top of each source file.
• Heinleinian 14y ago
  Just off the top of my head, I'd guess it's due to a lot of e's in words that, depending on the language, you'll see in almost every single method or function. Things like return, end, else, true, include, self, private, etc.
  • zxoq 14y ago
    Don't forget set / get, which ubiquitous in almost every language.