Frequency analysis of human language shows that word usage follows a Power law distribution (Zipf's Law) which, for example, means that:

  * the 75 most common words make up 40% of occurrences
  * the 200 most common words make up 50% of occurrences
  * the 524 most common words make up 60% of occurrences
  * the 1257 most common words make up 70% of occurrences
  * the 2925 most common words make up 80% of occurrences

Speculatively, similar frequency analyses of library calls in various codebases for a programming language may reveal a similar long-tail distribution. This would provide a list of high frequency library routines that would be worth memorising - with clearly diminishing returns as the vocabulary grows.

This kind of analysis would also point at important targets for optimisation, simplification and parallelisation as well as direct the efforts of library implementers for new languages.