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At a previous job I rewrote a (~9k lines) Java app in Java and ended up with a 77% reduction in lines of code! So it would appear that the "smart programmer effect" is likely larger than the effect of most languages.

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In this case, I was re-implementing the C++ app I had written - so it was the same programmer authoring both codebases.

I expect if I rewrote either codebase again, it might shrink even more.

You can compress a lot of ruby code a few %age points by mashing the bottoms of the functions into "end;end;end;end;", same with C code that has curly braces on their own lines.

So this is similar to benchmarks: if you don't write a long paragraph about methodology, SLOCs and benchmarks are misleading

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