Most and Least Verbose Programming Languages

pwshguy (mdowst)@programming.dev to Programming@programming.dev – 298 points –

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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Haskell being so high really doesn't make any sense. Experience level maybe?

It's one of the tersest languages out there.

Bash being so high is what confuses me.

Damn near everything is an acronym

I guess it takes more calls to different programs to do a task

It's hard make such comparisons on "real world" code, and challenges use to be more attractive to people trying to learn, so your hypothesis make sense.