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Luke_A_Somers comments on Open thread, January 25- February 1 - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: NancyLebovitz 25 January 2014 02:52PM

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Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 27 January 2014 03:57:18PM *  0 points [-]

It depends on your language and coding style, doesn't it? I've seen C style guides that require you to stretch out onto 15 lines what I'd hope to take 4, and in a good functional language shouldn't take more than 2.

Comment author: Lumifer 27 January 2014 04:18:16PM 1 point [-]

Yes, and the number of lines is a ridiculously bad metric of the code's complexity anyway.

Was a funny moment when someone I know was doing a Java assignment, I got curious, and it turned out that a full page of Java code is three lines in Perl :-)

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 27 January 2014 04:22:04PM *  0 points [-]

That really depends on coding style, again. I find that common Java coding styles are hideously decompressed, and become far more readable if you do a few things per line instead of maybe half a thing. Even they aren't as bad as the worst C coding styles I've seen, though, where it takes like 7 lines to declare a function.

As for Perl vs Java... was it solved in Perl by a Regex? That's one case where if you don't know what you're doing, Java can end up really bloated but it usually doesn't need to be all that bad.

Comment author: Lumifer 27 January 2014 04:40:13PM 0 points [-]

As for Perl vs Java... was it solved in Perl by a Regex?

I don't remember the details by now, but I think that yes, there was a regexp and a map, and a few of Perl's shortcuts turned out to be useful...