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.
Java placed way better than I expected
You can write concise Java. Just like you can write readable Haskell. It’s just not idiomatic to do so.
It is always dismissed as too verbose, while in go’s case it is never mentioned, when in fact the latter is way more verbose.. People’s bias show.
I will gladly complain any day about go being terribly verbose.
Maybe also bias by the number / experience of people using it.
1st semester students getting shocked by
public static void main(String args)and meming it on the internet.Go on the other hand likely isn't a common choice / option for a first language.
They weren't writing enterprise Java or they'd need a dozen factories and a few factory factories and probably a factory factory factory just to be safe.
Code Golf rules allow people to submit an anonymous function instead of a full program, which eliminates a lot of the boilerplate.
I don’t know the specifics of the golf problems, but I’m mostly in c#, also notorious for “having too much boilerplate,” and it looks like it’s 3rd by char count.
My guess is that languages with comprehensive standard libraries can do more with less custom code. As you should expect.
Yes, but it looks like it is already I think more than twice as verbose as Python.
What's interesting to me is how differently C# scored vs Java.