this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023

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Programming

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Most and Least Verbose Programming Languages (programming.dev)

submitted 2 years ago by pwshguy to c/programming

95 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I was looking at code.golf the other day and I wondered which languages were the least verbose, so I did a little data gathering.

I looked at 48 different languages that had completed 79 different code challenges on code.golf. I then gathered the results for each language and challenge. If a "golfer" had more than 1 submission to a challenge, I grabbed the most recent one. I then dropped the top 5% and bottom 5% to hopefully mitigate most outliers. Then came up with an average for each language, for each challenge. I then averaged the results across each language and that is what you see here.

For another perspective, I ranked each challenge then got the average ranking across all challenges. Below is the results of that.

Disclaimer: This is in no way scientific. It's just for fun. If you know of a better way to sort these results please let me know.

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[–] gamma 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It's interesting, the results here are way different than the Code Golf & Coding Challenges Stack Exchange. I would never expect Haskell to be that low. But after looking at code.golf, I realize it's because I/O on CG&CC is more relaxed. Most Haskell submissions are functions which return the solution.

Sidenote: I like the CG&CC method, it's semi-competitive, semi-cooperative.

all languages welcome
almost all users post "Try it Online"/"Attempt This Online" links
most users post explanations under their submissions
often people will post solutions beginning with "port of user1234's excellent Foolang answer" when there's a clever shortcut someone finds
or people will post their own solution with "here's a solution which doesn't use user1234's algorithm"
or people will add comments to answers with minor improvements

IMO It's geared towards what is the best part about code golf: teaching people about algorithm design and language design.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

How come kotlin isn't there

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

What, SQL is down the bottom?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

im confused, c and c have header files that are super verbose, not sure how its so high up that list

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Header files are optional, they duplicate function declarations to share between multiple files, but otherwise you could write c/c++/c# without headers... the compiler might just run out of memory.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Surprised by C# and Java. People always moan that they have too much boilerplate code and something else about how OOP sucks and that makes these languages too verbose, yet they're close to the top of the chart here for least characters used on average.

[–] BatmanAoD 4 points 2 years ago

I suspect this is more a symptom of "enterprise" design patterns than the language itself. Though I do think the standard library in Java is a bit more verbose than necessary.

[–] etler 4 points 2 years ago

I think Java's verbosity has more to do with the culture than the language itself

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

This is why I only use machine code

[–] u_tamtam 3 points 2 years ago

Any idea how Scala would rank? I have a hard time thinking it'd end up far away from Ruby.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Why is sql so low?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

It's probably not used much for code golf, except for when it can be leveraged for specific tasks in which it excels.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It would be interesting to see how this ranking changes if the goal is "very succinct, but not unreadable" or "most idiomatic" rather than the code golf incentive of "any arcane nonsense for 1 less char".

[–] pixelpop3 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'm not familiar with code.golf but I wonder how whitespace is handled? I find python is very concise anyway, but I wonder how the white space is counted (single tab, four spaces for black, etc).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

NO WAY php is more verbose than Java.

[–] derpgon 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It is not, though. Not according to the graph.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Weird this is not the graph I remember having seen first time, The one I saw had python at the very top, have I commented on the wrong post ?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

this one has python at the top

[–] Joph 1 points 2 years ago

There are two images. One of them has Python as #1, the other doesn't.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

I hate Python 3 requires parantes for print. Python 2 accepted print 'hi'. Vs print('hi')

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