The 100 Most Used Clojure Expressions by Eric Normand.
From the post:
Summary: Would you like to optimize your learning of Clojure? Would you like to focus on learning only the most useful parts of the language first? Take this lesson from second language learning: learn the expressions in order of frequency of use.
When I was learning Spanish, I liked to use Anki to drill new vocabulary. It’s a flashcard program. I found that someone had made a set of cards from an analysis of thousands of newspapers. They read in all of the words from the newspapers, counted them up, and figured out what the most common words were. The top 1000 made it into the deck.
It turns out that this is a very good strategy for learning words. Word frequency follows a hockey stick distribution. The most common words are used so much more than the less common words. For instance, the 100 most common English words make up more than 50% of text. If you’ve got limited time, you should learn those most common words first.
People who are trying to learn Clojure have been asking me “how do I learn all of this stuff? There’s so much!” It’s a valid question and I haven’t had a good answer. I remembered the Spanish newspaper analysis and I thought I’d try to do a similar analysis of Clojure expressions.
…
Is Eric seriously suggesting using lessons learned in another field? 😉
Of course, for a CS conference using the top 100 most common Clojure expressions would have a title similar to:
Use of High Frequency Terminology Repetition: A Small Group Study (maybe 12 participants)
You could, of course, skip waiting for a conference presentation with a title like that one, followed by peer reviewed paper(s), more conference presentations and its final appearance in a collection of potential ways to improve CS instruction.
Let me know if Eric’s suggestion works for you.
Enjoy!
PS: Thanks Eric!