Yeah I don't really like them either, and I wrote them. I thought twice about including the percentages, and I did try to highlight that fact:
Note that the percentages below are only relative to
these 2 sets of 3 characters, and don’t represent the
total percentage of keystrokes saved.
The percentages are only really there to provide an easier way to compare the (relatively small) Ruby sample, and the (relatively large) PHP sample. Simply saying that one project saved 6000 strokes vs. the other with 100,000 strokes seemed a bit meaningless given the relative sizes of the projects, and doing a full-on frequency analysis of modifier key usage seemed like more trouble that it was worth... perhaps in hindsight I should have done it anyway.
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Yeah I don't really like them either, and I wrote them. I thought twice about including the percentages, and I did try to highlight that fact:
The percentages are only really there to provide an easier way to compare the (relatively small) Ruby sample, and the (relatively large) PHP sample. Simply saying that one project saved 6000 strokes vs. the other with 100,000 strokes seemed a bit meaningless given the relative sizes of the projects, and doing a full-on frequency analysis of modifier key usage seemed like more trouble that it was worth... perhaps in hindsight I should have done it anyway.zokier provided an interesting link to a previous discussion below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2973776, specifically http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2977303) which does a much more thorough analysis of Finnish/Swedish vs. US layouts - I'd like to run his code using the Japanese layout when I get a chance.