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.
Is Dart inherently verbose, or does it just seem that way because people are using it to make Flutter widgets and they’re verbose? When you look at the Dart syntax it doesn’t seem like it needs to be verbose, but Flutter code certainly can be.
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.
And yet C with its not at all comprehensive standard library did well. I’m a bit puzzled about these results.
There’s no way that Go is more verbose than Java. I’ve written both in decent quantities and Java was always way more verbose than Go for me. I suspect it’s the nature of code.golf giving these results more than the languages themselves.
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.
You’re confused, I get it. You only need one factory factory as long as you sprinkle Inversion of Craziness (IoC) all over everything. Also, for this to work you must spread your code into as many files/directories as possible and also make sure you use really, really strict and verbose XML that doesn’t just define how your code runs but instead generates code itself.
I highly suspect the reason why Java didn’t seem to have as much code is because the authors were using proper enterprise Java which is mostly XML that can only be understood if your IDE takes at least 5 minutes to open and another 5 to open your project.
Honestly, I prefer an overly long name over some cryptic naming scheme that looks like minified JS. At least you can be sure of the variable’s purpose and don’t have to guess, which is far better for readability.
How is it’s current state for building windows binaries? As a game dev who wants to fiddle with doing “everything from scratch” at least once, Crystal always seemed extremely enticing, the syntax more so than Nim
For me at least, it’s less about forcing indentation as much as limiting what I can do with visual indentation.
Sometimes, it’s nice to group lines at a given indentation level for visual comprehension vs the needs of the interpreter.
And to be fair, I don’t hate Python’s indentation style. It’s usually not a major problem in practice. It’s just that without the ability to override it, I lose a tool for expressing intent.
Clean code would have indentation though, and you can use whatever space you want as indentation. Bonus points if you use tabs so that others with special needs can configure the tab length on their end.
And I don’t think I’ve encountered an indentation error since the day I learned the language. How often do you encounter that error when writing python scripts? Sounds more like a theoretical problem than something anyone used to python would encounter.
You can get some bad bugs due to the fact that white space is significant, not because you are using it. For example how is the IDE supposed to know when you’re done writing your if statement? Or done with a loop? It’s impossible. It’s pretty telling that Python is the only language on this list that has significant white space.(somebody please check me on this, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss anything here).
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I’m surprised C is so low. I feel like I need to write 5x more code (compared to C++/Rust) to do the exact same thing.
You have not read enough code from IOCCC.
Is Dart inherently verbose, or does it just seem that way because people are using it to make Flutter widgets and they’re verbose? When you look at the Dart syntax it doesn’t seem like it needs to be verbose, but Flutter code certainly can be.
This is from codegolf competitions, so non-Flutter I’d assume.
Idk, in my short experience with it, it feels very Java like in verbosity
Why would golfscript be more verbose than some others? Isn’t it made for golfing?
Rest in pieces golfcels it’s pychad time
I’m suprised by F# position
Java placed way better than I expected
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.
And yet C with its not at all comprehensive standard library did well. I’m a bit puzzled about these results.
There’s no way that Go is more verbose than Java. I’ve written both in decent quantities and Java was always way more verbose than Go for me. I suspect it’s the nature of code.golf giving these results more than the languages themselves.
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.
Ya but then you’ll need a factory for all of those factories
You’re confused, I get it. You only need one factory factory as long as you sprinkle Inversion of Craziness (IoC) all over everything. Also, for this to work you must spread your code into as many files/directories as possible and also make sure you use really, really strict and verbose XML that doesn’t just define how your code runs but instead generates code itself.
I highly suspect the reason why Java didn’t seem to have as much code is because the authors were using proper enterprise Java which is mostly XML that can only be understood if your IDE takes at least 5 minutes to open and another 5 to open your project.
What’s interesting to me is how differently C# scored vs Java.
Code Golf rules allow people to submit an anonymous function instead of a full program, which eliminates a lot of the boilerplate.
You can write concise Java. Just like you can write readable Haskell. It’s just not idiomatic to do so.
Yes, but it looks like it is already I think more than twice as verbose as Python.
System.out.print("I agree.");Don’t you mean:
I wonder if it’s all those variables named with single letter and abbreviations, so annoying to code review
String IDontKnowWhatsWorseEspeciallyWhenTheTypeIsAlsoIncludedString = “I don’t know what’s worse, especially when the type is also included”;
Honestly, I prefer an overly long name over some cryptic naming scheme that looks like minified JS. At least you can be sure of the variable’s purpose and don’t have to guess, which is far better for readability.
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.
Go’s less verbose than Java in my experience. And I’ve written quite a lot of both. But YMMV.
My mileage has indeed varied.
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.
How come kotlin isn’t there
Apparently it due to an issue with Kotlin - https://github.com/code-golf/code-golf/issues/151#issuecomment-1126266250
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With my professional experience in COBOL, I can honestly say I’m not surprised at all!
Just gonna drop by to say that I love Crystal
How is it’s current state for building windows binaries? As a game dev who wants to fiddle with doing “everything from scratch” at least once, Crystal always seemed extremely enticing, the syntax more so than Nim
Functional but missing a couple of features
I’m unsure sorry, I’ve only ever used it on Linux.
Are you using it for scientific stuff? Are you doing Crystal Math? (/s)
I had a fun hour looking up some of these. I also noticed the absence of Assembler. Fun post.
For some reason their API would not return anything for assembly. I was curious to see where it would rank too,
On another look, though, we have to keep in mind, though that this is code-golf, so in no way representative for actual code-bases.
Interesting that zig is so much lower than c in expressiveness. Isn’t that a bit weird?
This is why I love Ruby: Nearly as concise as Python but never complains about whitespace or indentation.
I’ve never understood the complaint about forced indentation. What kind of monster doesn’t use indentation for their code anyway?
If anything, it’s nice that the language forces it on you so that you don’t stumble on code written by one of those monsters.
For me at least, it’s less about forcing indentation as much as limiting what I can do with visual indentation.
Sometimes, it’s nice to group lines at a given indentation level for visual comprehension vs the needs of the interpreter.
And to be fair, I don’t hate Python’s indentation style. It’s usually not a major problem in practice. It’s just that without the ability to override it, I lose a tool for expressing intent.
I write pretty clean code already, and the white space errors just get in the way of getting things done.
Clean code would have indentation though, and you can use whatever space you want as indentation. Bonus points if you use tabs so that others with special needs can configure the tab length on their end.
And I don’t think I’ve encountered an indentation error since the day I learned the language. How often do you encounter that error when writing python scripts? Sounds more like a theoretical problem than something anyone used to python would encounter.
You can get some bad bugs due to the fact that white space is significant, not because you are using it. For example how is the IDE supposed to know when you’re done writing your if statement? Or done with a loop? It’s impossible. It’s pretty telling that Python is the only language on this list that has significant white space.(somebody please check me on this, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss anything here).
Hmm interesting, I would’ve thought that Haskell would rank much higher
it’s probably not code golfed and the type signatures probably weren’t elided. because otherwise I’d expect it to be above javascript.
Why is sql so low?
It’s probably not used much for code golf, except for when it can be leveraged for specific tasks in which it excels.
Because the other languages use more characters on average like it says?