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.

  • Semi-Hemi-Demigod
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    fedilink
    210 months ago

    I write pretty clean code already, and the white space errors just get in the way of getting things done.

    • @UlrikHDA
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      510 months ago

      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.