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Comment by alpb | Hacker News Reader

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. Almost no ":" used in Python. "/" key is more popular than "[" "]" in Objective-C. This makes no sense. I don't believe that blog post.

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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.

Don't forget set / get, which ubiquitous in almost every language.

Because it is the most common letter in English and used for variable and identifier names.

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.

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 '/'.

That's a good point. Regarding the '/' I'm betting the code sample was very well commented.

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.

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