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.

  • GiantRobotTRex@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    It makes more sense when you realize it’s based on code.golf submissions. No one is going to create a class like that for a code golf problem. They’re probably not going to create any classes (other than one just to hold the main function).

    I’m pretty sure I can do the Fibonnaci one with less code than your simple class. Because these problems are simple enough they don’t benefit from any OOP stuff so you avoid most of the syntactic overhead.

    I am surprised it’s not higher in the list since the overhead of setting up a main method is still quite significant compared to most languages. But other than that, these problems can be solved without running into any egregious examples of overhead.