How We Talk

Ever wonder what we talk about here? I just finished a word frequency study of this site. I counted the number of pages that contained any particular word. These are the top ten frequently occurring words of at least six letters.

1. category
   1. people
   2. because
   3. should
   4. software
   5. things
   6. programming
   7. something
   8. really
   9. system

The count is the number of pages upon which the words can be found. Here are all 354 words that appear on at least a thousand pages.

• http://c2.com/wiki/HowWeTalk.txt

Interesting, eh? -- WardCunningham

Have WikiNames been filtered from this list? -- StijnSanders

No, their parts are treated as separate words so ProgrammingLanguage counts as one for Programming and one for Language.

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It looks like they confirm the topic of the Wiki as PeopleProjectsAndPatterns. Structures, systems, patterns, problems all score highly.

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Following the example of WikiWordStatistics, we find in this list some of the ExtremeProgramming practices:

• always * little * change (IncrementalDevelopment)
• working * someone * enough (FortyHourWeek)
• understand * interesting * problems (SpikeSolution)
• making * common * source (CollectiveCodeOwnership)
• everything * changes (ReFactoring)
• approach * specific * examples (UserStory)
• [not] complex * unless * necessary (DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork)
• research * meaning * actual * coding (SpikeSolution)
• client * involved (OnsiteCustomer)

some AntiPatterns:

• author * against * various * testing
• projects * control * programmers

an observation:

• practices * delete * values

finally, for the SmugSmalltalkWeenies:

• smalltalk * created * technology

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This was just crying out for a bit of PoemWiki. http://downlode.org/wiki/wikiwordspoetry.cgi -- EarleMartin

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I've looked into BNC (British National Corpus, which is one of the largest English corpus in the world) word frequency list at http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff/bnc-readme.html (BrokenLink) try (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/) and chose those with at least six letters and listed the top ten:

1. should
2. people
3. because
   1. between
   2. through
   3. become
   4. government
   5. system
   6. number
   7. however

Compare this list with the one above. (One of the interesting things to notice is that "system" is a very common word in general English written or spoken.)

-- JuneKim

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Search Corpus (BNC)

• For word used (simple search)
  • http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/using/index.xml?ID=simple

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See WikiStatistics, WikiWordStatistics

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CategoryWikiStructure