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.
Not expected C# to be this high. Also did not expected F# be so far away from C#.
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.
In newer versions of C# you can use top level statements, which remove a lot of characters