Most and Least Verbose Programming Languages
Most and Least Verbose Programming Languages
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.
System.out.print("I agree.");Don't you mean:
class AgreementManagerClass { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("I agree."); } }
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.
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.
I will gladly complain any day about go being terribly verbose.
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.
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.
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.
I'd love to see the same comparison with more real-world use-cases.
Code golf, is mostly pretty simple use-cases, which have been optimized many times over.
When, you build out an application with a user-interface, proper event handling, etc.... c++ is MUCH more verbose then c# for example, and they are ranked pretty close together.
I think code golf is a great dataset for this kind of analysis specifically because they are artificial and people are paying attention to the number of characters used. Leetcode solutions might be a better option though.
In real world projects there are too many confounding factors. People aren’t implementing servers in brainfuck or websites in C. Even rewrites of a project into another language have more/fewer features. So it’s an apples to oranges comparison.
But a big problem with this dataset is error handling - or really the complete lack thereof. Real code needs to deal with errors and they can add a lot depending on the language.
I was very surprised to see rust and go so close as I find go vastly more verbose due to error handling and need to reimplement things like searching a list. But code golf type problems ignore these types of things that you see in real code.
So there is not really and useful conclusion that can be made except if you spend all day writing code golf problems.
Not expected C# to be this high. Also did not expected F# be so far away from C#.
In newer versions of C# you can use top level statements, which remove a lot of characters
Yeah that seems suspicious. F# is pretty succinct.
My guess is that this is really a measure of how much abuse the language will tolerate. C# probably lets you get away with a bunch of things (like checking for nulls) that F# requires.
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.
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.
I'm really surprised to see Java ranked as less-verbose than OCaml.
Here's an equivalent code sample in Java 17 vs OCaml:
Java:
abstract sealed class Expr permits Value, Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide { abstract long eval(); } record Value(long value) extends Expr { @Override long eval() { return value; } } record Add(Expr left, Expr right) { @Override long eval() { return left.eval() + right.eval(); } } record Subtract(Expr left, Expr right) { @Override long eval() { return left.eval() - right.eval(); } } record Multiply(Expr left, Expr right) { @Override long eval() { return left.eval() * right.eval(); } } record Divide(Expr left, Expr right) { @Override long eval() { return left.eval() / right.eval(); } }OCaml:
type expr = | Value of int | Add of expr * expr | Subtract of expr * expr | Multiply of expr * expr | Divide of expr * expr let rec eval = function | Value value -> value | Add (left, right) -> (eval left) + (eval right) | Subtract (left, right) -> (eval left) - (eval right) | Multiply (left, right) -> (eval left) * (eval right) | Divide (left, right) -> (eval left) / (eval right)....Java has so much more syntactical overhead than OCaml, and that's even with recent Java and being pretty aggressive about using boiler-plate reducing sugars like Records. And F# has even less, since it doesn't require you to use different operators for numerics or do as much manual casting between strings/numerics
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.
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.
make sure you're following !crystal_lang@lemmy.ml
Are you using it for scientific stuff? Are you doing Crystal Math? (/s)
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.
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.
What the heck is brainfuck?? Maybe a hot take but I wouldn't wanna program in that /s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck
For those wondering (like myself)
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.
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).
Everyone's comparing the placements of their favorite language and I'm just left wondering how GolfScript gets beaten by seven other languages. I take it out was created specifically to do well on code golf? Mission failed, I guess.
Would assembly be higher or lower than brainfuck?
Assembly would be lower. You have more complex / direct instructions in assembly. Brain fuck is pretty much just a pure turing machine, and has 8 instructions.
X86 has ~ 1000 + variants. Even ARM with a smaller instruction set has 232 instructions.
In brain fuck to set a number you'd have to count up (or down - underflow) to that number. In assembly you just set it.
Somewhere I've read that current assembly code with Makros should be similar to writing C.
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
I'm suprised by F# position
Why would golfscript be more verbose than some others? Isn't it made for golfing?
Rest in pieces golfcels it's pychad time
Interesting that zig is so much lower than c in expressiveness. Isn't that a bit weird?
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
Super interesting to see that. Didn't expect Python to have such a lead, but it is understandable.
import codegolf codegolf.challenge1()Yeah, they should count lines including the libraries, interesting to see where python would end up then.
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.
With my professional experience in COBOL, I can honestly say I'm not surprised at all!
Rust is so brief it's not even listedI can't readIt is there, its the 20th. I was searching for that as well.
im confused, c and c have header files that are super verbose, not sure how its so high up that list
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.
What, SQL is down the bottom?
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.
C# is what I primarily write at work, and it’s honestly great to work with. The actual business logic tends to be easy to express, and while I do write a some boilerplate/ceremony, most of it is for the framework and not the language itself. Even that boilerplate generally tends to have shorthand in the language.
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.
I think Java's verbosity has more to do with the culture than the language itself
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,
This is why I only use machine code
Any idea how Scala would rank? I have a hard time thinking it'd end up far away from Ruby.
Why is sql so low?
Because the other languages use more characters on average like it says?
It's probably not used much for code golf, except for when it can be leveraged for specific tasks in which it excels.
I was like "what is going to be the most verbose? opens image Ah yep brainfuck, that makes sense".
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).
Who tf uses OCaml. It was created by my alma mater, we hated studying that shit, it was invented for crazy people.
we hated studying that shit
It's a more than fine functional programming language if you ask me. Was that the functional aspect that you disliked? Or the syntax? Because in one case like the other I've got some bad news for you about what's to come in the programming languages landscape :)
Who tf uses OCaml.
The rust compiler (initially), large financial companies, the energy sector, etc: practically anywhere functional programming shines
written by a Scala programmer
Seems quite nice compared to bloody scheme
I hate Python 3 requires parantes for print. Python 2 accepted print 'hi'. Vs print('hi')