It was excessive to call it “silly” but program length still seems very imperfect way to measure the ease of writing programs in a given language. Better to directly measure things like programming time or number of bugs.
It’s silly when you’re measuring it in “lines of code”, because “line” is a somewhat arbitrary construct, for which “chunks of text delimited by newlines” is a worse approximation than most people think. (Quick proof: in many languages, stripping out all the newlines yields an equivalent program, so that all programs are effectively one-liners.)
Then it’s a good thing I didn’t measure it that way, or use that term in this entire thread! Whenever I did refer to measures of program length, it was with constructions such as:
some can span a broader array of programs using fewer symbols (due to how they combine and accumulate meaning faster)
Why is program length a silly thing?
It was excessive to call it “silly” but program length still seems very imperfect way to measure the ease of writing programs in a given language. Better to directly measure things like programming time or number of bugs.
It’s silly when you’re measuring it in “lines of code”, because “line” is a somewhat arbitrary construct, for which “chunks of text delimited by newlines” is a worse approximation than most people think. (Quick proof: in many languages, stripping out all the newlines yields an equivalent program, so that all programs are effectively one-liners.)
Then it’s a good thing I didn’t measure it that way, or use that term in this entire thread! Whenever I did refer to measures of program length, it was with constructions such as: