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
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.
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.