Boilerplate Tax – Ranking popular programming languages by density | Hacker News Reader

Boilerplate Tax – Ranking popular programming languages by density

boyter.org

14 pointsnnx13 comments

"Clojure and indeed all lisp style languages are the final boss of density here though. Almost every line is an expression of business logic. I never really got into it myself, but looking at these results are starting to make me rethink that decision.

If you compare Clojure (77.91%) to C# (58.4%), it seems the average C# developer writes 20% more redundant code every single day just to satisfy the compiler. Even with tools like resharper and LLM’s to help thats not a insignificant amount of effort."

C'mon, this is a bs "research".

Fore example, is this Java (65.72% dryness)

    if (condition){
      Blah();
    }

really more dense than this C# (58.4% dryness)?

    if (condition)
    {
      Blah();
    }

Now, does this Clojure 77.91 dryness) really beats them both to that margin?

   (if (condition) 
      (blah)))

This metric measures formatting more than anything else. I don't even go to other more nuanced details.

Good point. They should treat stand-alone braces and parens as empty lines and rerun the analysis. I'd like to see the results.

But still.. are 41.6% the lines of C# code stand-alone braces?

Probably not, but it’d be closer to Clojure. Depending on codebase you’ll likely have also many repeating namespace imports (can be avoided whith implicit usings in modern C#) etc.

Here's a better gauge for code density:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

How source-code size is measured

We start with the source-code markup you can see, remove comments, remove duplicate whitespace characters, and then apply minimum GZip compression. The measurement is the size in bytes of that GZip compressed source-code file.

Thanks to Brian Hurt for the idea of using size of compressed source-code instead of lines of code.

  median
  February 2025
  ===============
  Toit        558
  Perl        570
  Lua         580
  PHP         581
  Ruby        583
  Python 3    585
  Julia       634
  Chapel      646
  Racket      696
  JavaScript  698
  OCaml       741
  Erlang      798
  Go          831
  Dart        847
  Smalltalk   871
  Haskell     892
  Java        910
  Lisp        938
  Swift       939
  F#          943
  Pascal      959
  Fortran    1091
  C#         1117
  C          1121
  C++        1129
  Rust       1235
  Ada        1825

The Benchmarks Game has some highly optimized implementations and is not a good representation of typical code. Some languages allow you to go a lot lower than others if needed, which adds verbosity, that does not mean typical code must be verbose. There are things possible in C# that you just can't do in Java, for example. That does not mean typical Java code is more concise than C#. On the contrary, typical C# would be probably considerably more "dense".

Good points.

There is a trade-off.

Outside hotspots, readability / maintainability should take precedence.

I dislike the short windows for editing / deletion.

I could have just agreed and left it at that.

And yet, it may still be "a better gauge for code density".

> … is not a good representation of typical code.

afaict that's unknown and "typical" weasel word and median.

I'd expect programming style to have a lot to do with it. Many modern languages are evolving toward Lisp and support ever more of its features. Generic programming and meta programming for instance.

(I think the tool used accounts for imports and defines.)

A section of SICP that doesn't get enough attention imo:

2.5 Systems with Generic Operations

https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/2_002e5.xhtml

Succinctness is Power

https://paulgraham.com/power.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com