[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why can't Haskell be faster?

[Ketil Malde]

"Sebastian Sylvan" <sebastian.sylvan at gmail.com> writes:

[LOC vs gz as a program complexity metric]

>> Obviously no simple measure is going to satisfy everyone, but I think the
>> gzip measure is more even handed across a range of languages.  
>> It probably more closely aproximates the amount of mental effort [..]

I'm not sure I follow that reasoning?

At any rate, I think the ICFP contest is much better as a measure of
productivity. But, just like for performance, LOC for the shootout can
be used as a micro-benchmark. 

> Personally I think syntactic noise is highly distracting, and semantic
> noise is even worse!

This is important - productivity doesn't depend so much on the actual
typing, but the ease of refactoring, identifying and fixing bugs, i.e
*reading* code.

Verbosity means noise, and also lower information content in a
screenful of code.

I think there were some (Erlang?) papers where they showed a
correlation between program size (in LOC), time of development, and
possibly number of bugs?) - regardless of language.

> Token count would be good, but then we'd need a parser for
> each language, which is quite a bit of work to do...

Whatever you do, it'll be an approximation, so why not 'wc -w'?

With 'wc -c' for J etc where programs can be written as spaceless
sequences of symbols.  Or just average chars, words and lines?

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants