Measuring source code conciseness across programming languages using compression

Abstract

It is well-known, and often a topic of heated debates, that programs in some programming languages are more concise than in others. This is a relevant factor when comparing or aggregating volume-impacted metrics on source code written in a combination of programming languages. In this paper, we present a model for measuring the conciseness of programming languages in a consistent, objective and evidence-based way. We present the approach, explain how it is founded on information theoretical principles, present detailed analysis steps and show the quantitative results of applying this model to a large benchmark of diverse commercial software applications. We demonstrate that our metric for language conciseness is strongly correlated with both an alternative analytical approach, and with a large scale developer survey, and show how its results can be applied to improve software metrics for multi-language applications.