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I never understood the gzip one. Repetitive boilerplate is bad; why hide it?

You're trying to understand the "true" size of the software in spite of the idiosyncrasies of a given language.

As I noted somewhere above, "size" is an abstract, dimensionless quality. It can only be approached through proxies. The more the merrier, I reckon, especially if they turn out to correlate with different things.

In the case of most projects, copy/paste code is not just because of the language. It's because of lousy programmers. I've seen large codebases which are made up of a full 40% duplicate code. There's no way to blame that on the language.

You're missing the point of the parent: There is no 'one true' metric. If you use different metrics (actual lines, logical lines, gzip'd size, etc) you may well find different correlations.

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