A bit of quantitative design for computer languages (about Java): http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-ldn1/
>From the article: >If one of the challenges of evolving a widely used language is that there's a >lot of code out there that we don't want to break, one of the benefits is that >there's a lot of code out there that we can use to analyze how often certain >idioms come up. By grabbing a big body of code (a corpus) and running an >analysis tool (often an instrumented version of the compiler) over it, you can >learn a lot about how often certain idioms come up in the real world, and >whether they are prevalent enough to influence how we evolve the language.< Bye, bearophile
