Subj : Re: curve for verbosity in a language
To   : comp.programming
From : Jon Harrop
Date : Thu Aug 04 2005 01:20 pm

pantagruel wrote:
> Well the thing I want is a theory of verbosity in a language, like that
> languages that are so verbose for doing x will always have a baseline
> verbosity of y no matter if we are doing something other than x.
> Obviously this is not a doable thing until one actually knows what is
> meant by verbosity, I'm not sure if we have a working definition of
> verbosity even though we all know it when we see it.

I found it useful to plot the verbosity (LOC) vs performance curves of
different languages for interesting tasks. The notion of verbosity is
inherently subjective. To try to make it objective you can try to adhere to
a programming style (but styles vary wildly between languages). Or you can
simply try to use a minimal number of characters and count the characters
needed, but this fails to take into account the importance of having a lot
of code on-screen at once when developing.

I tried (and failed) to get the shootout to adopt an objective style by
choosing the fastest implementation <100LOC or the shortest >100LOC.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com

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