Silly Metrics: The Most Used Java Keywords

Tell me…

• Haven’t you ever wondered how many times you actually “synchronized” something?
• Didn’t you worry about not using the “do {} while ()” loop structure often enough?
• Are you an expert in applying “volatile”?
• Do you “catch” more often than you “try”?
• Is your program rather “true” or rather “false?
• And how did that “goto” make it into your source code??

Here’s a bit of a distraction among all the other, rather informative posts I’ve written recently. An utterly useless ranking of the top Java keywords in jOOQ. I mean, after all, useful metrics can already be reviewed at ohloh, or collected with FindBugs and JArchitect

Now, you can figure it out. Here’s the ranking!

Keyword      Count
public       8127
return       6801
final        6608
import       5938
static       3903
new          3110
extends      2111
int          1822
throws       1756
void         1707
if           1661
this         1464
private      1347
class        1239
case         841
else         839
package      711
boolean      506
throw        495
for          421
long         404
true         384
byte         345
interface    337
false        332
protected    293
super        265
break        200
try          149
switch       146
implements   139
catch        127
default      112
instanceof   107
char         96
short        91
abstract     54
double       43
transient    42
finally      34
float        34
enum         25
while        23
continue     12
synchronized 8
volatile     6
do           1

Curious about your own Java keyword ranking? I’ve published the script to calculate these values on GitHub, under the ASL 2.0 license. Check out the sources here:

https://github.com/lukaseder/silly-metrics

Use it, and publish your own rankings! And feel free to provide pull requests to count keywords from other languages, or to calculate entirely different silly and useless metrics.