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.
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).
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.