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

[Sterling Clover]

As I understand it, the question is what you want to measure for.  
gzip is actually pretty good at, precisely because it removes  
boilerplate, reducing programs to something approximating their  
complexity. So a higher gzipped size means, at some level, a more  
complicated algorithm (in the case, maybe, of lower level languages,  
because there's complexity that's not lifted to the compiler). LOC  
per language, as I understand it, has been somewhat called into  
question as a measure of productivity, but there's still a  
correlation between programmers and LOC across languages even if it  
wasn't as strong as thought -- on the other hand, bugs per LOC seems  
to have been fairly strongly debunked as something constant across  
languages. If you want a measure of the language as a language, I  
guess LOC/gzipped is a good ratio for how much "noise" it introduces  
-- but if you want to measure just pure speed across similar  
algorithmic implementations, which, as I understand it, is what the  
shootout is all about, then gzipped actually tends to make some sense.

--S