Zipf's law in programming

When I discover that my hyperbolic usage conjecture is not new

In 2020 I made the observation, which I called the hyperbolic usage conjecture, that in C++ a few types are used a lot and a lot of types that are used very few times.

Then I said that this applies to C++ concepts as well.

I knew that using the hyperbola as a name for the curve is not perfect, it only meant that it’s large for values close to zero and it’s small for values further from zero.

This applies to other programming languages, though, say in LUA or Python, the curve might have a different shape depending on the community ability to define new types.

It turns out it’s not a new idea: Zipf’s Law.

The funny sounding Zipf is the surname of an American linguist George Zipf, who observed that that the frequency of words in a natural language decreases in a similar way. He’s not the first one to make such observations either.

It’s also not the only curve, it comes from a family of curves called “power law”.