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Gabriel comments on Open Thread, September 15-30, 2012 - Less Wrong
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That's the short version. The full paper is here. I found it while looking for a similar comparison that I remembered seeing mentioned several times when I had been interested in Common Lisp and it turned out to be a follow-up to that. Oh, and those things actually looked at time spent programming, so they didn't measure only silly things like program length.
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:
Thanks for digging that up! Also, I did not want to imply that only silly things are measured, but rather that the most interesting questions are still unanswered due to various constraints.