Comments on: Word frequencies in human and computer languages

By: Derek Jones

Derek Jones — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 01:15:23 +0000

The information you are after is available, at least for C. I would advocate teaching students the 2..4 most commonly occurring instances of a construct. It would simplify code a lot, making life a lot easy for subsequent maintainers of the code and making life a lot easier for optimizing compilers and static analyzers.

By: gwern

gwern — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:23:53 +0000

You might find http://jtauber.com/blog/2008/02/10/a_new_kind_of_graded_reader/
and http://jtauber.com/blog/2004/11/26/programmed_vocabulary_learning_as_a_travelling_salesman_problem/
interesting.

The idea is to figure out what new word will bring as many sentences as possible closer to being understood. Repeat and in exchange for learning a few words, you can read many sentences. (I have a Haskell implementation I work on every so often, but since I’m not actively learning any languages, and it’s not at all obvious how to do this for a programming language, I haven’t looked at it in a long time.)

By: Times Series Methods versus Recurrence Relations | John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:41:56 +0000

[...] hope John D. Cook will forgive me for using the Fibonacci sequence as my example. While I totally agree with John [...]

By: John

John — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:23:23 +0000

Thanks, Greg. That looks like a good paper.

By: Greg Wilson

Greg Wilson — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:19:57 +0000

You might enjoy Todd Veldhuizen’s “Software Libraries and Their Reuse: Entropy, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Zipf’s Law”, available at http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0508023.

By: David Wolever

David Wolever — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:04:32 +0000

“It would be interesting to write a programming language tutorial that introduces the keywords in the approximately the order of their frequency. Such a book might be quite unorthodox, and quite useful.”

Interesting idea.

Also, interesting that you mention this… Just yesterday I got around to analyzing the first round of data from vim-logging, a patched version of Vim which records which commands I use most. The analysis of that is here: http://blog.codekills.net/archives/67-You-and-Your-Editor-Data-from-vim-logging-2-of-N.html