Comment by hxa7241 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hxa7241 | Hacker News Reader

The program get shorter because the author learned more and improved it each time, not mainly because of the languages.

Mainstream programming languages do not seem to vary much in lines of code of programs: the range is maybe about 2 or 3. Here is evidence: http://www.hxa.name/minilight/#comparison

This stands to reason. Look at everyday languages: they all have the same features -- they are perhaps surprisingly similar in basic structure. Control-flow, operations, data-primitives, data-compounds -- all are very similar. One of the more outlying is C: lacking common higher-level amenities like exceptions, nice data-structures, and particularly storage management, can expand code significantly.

These kinds of comparisons are worthless, because they are too short to show the advantages of large scale application of language specific idioms. LOC is not really a good measure of code size. The number of symbols is better. A single line of Java can be way more verbose than the same line in Python.

More than a decade ago I worked on a compiler written in C++ and did an exercise to see what the savings would be to implement it in Python. IIRC it was something like 80%. There were huge savings in the size of static data structures. A lot was due to the fact that Python lent itself to being an ad hoc DSL.

Do you still have the code?

To be fair, the languages that I think lend themselves most to low LOC are haskell, common lisp, and clojure. None of these are covered in the minilight comparison.

Also, K.

Your list misses some pretty significant features that don't exist in Java, including lexical closures, list comprehensions, and macros.

Try spending some time on 4Clojure. For a while I was routinely solving problems in half a dozen lines or more, only to find that other people had done them in one line.

Also of course, Paul Graham has said a few things about this, such as: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

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