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Comment by herdrick | Hacker News Reader

This is great.

If you've looked at Peter Norvig's spell checker shootout you won't be surprised much. Ex., the story on Common Lisp and Scheme implementations is the same here: MzScheme is the mediocre best of an unimpressive lot. (I want to see Clojure and Arc on this.) Python looks great again. F# looks weak here but wins big in the spell checker with reasonable-looking code. Sounds interesting.

What's the deal with Squeak? I had thought that it very concise.

The meta-message here is best of all: people are measuring language conciseness.

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Well, arc's running on top of MzScheme, so it's likely to be a bit slower. Also, Stalin in the left column is a Scheme implementation, albeit one that is very restrictive for sake of raw speed.

Also, it's worth noting that the features in a language that make large systems' codebases manageable (such as good module systems) are different from the features that allow you to pare down small scripts further. It's hard to show features supporting conciseness-in-the-large in a one page benchmark, so IMHO the latter is often greatly overemphasized. Being able to knock 2 lines off 20 is often just a parlor trick, though, while 50kloc off of 200kloc can mean life or death for a project. The programming world would be a happier place if the size of every legacy C++ / Java codebase were cut by a double-digit percentage.

> > (I want to see Clojure and Arc on this.)

> Well, arc's running on top of MzScheme, so it's likely to be a bit slower.

I'd be interested to see how Arc fares on the code-size axis.

Are there any large projects using it?

I don't know much about the Shootout, but my guess is that, if someone wants Arc there, they need to go and write whatever programs the Shootout requires you to write in order to participate in the Shootout.

I'd try it, but I don't know Arc (or Lisp yet, for that matter). If someone here knows Arc and wants to see it in the Shootout, I suggest they look into the faq: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/faq.php

Just a guess, but: Squeak only uses text files as an export format, and that format is more verbose than file-based source code would normally be. If you only counted the code and not the metadata, it would probably do better.

Not much - Smalltalk code is written in sentences not squiggles.

The productivity comes from reading and re-using the code that has already been written rather than duplicating stuff.

Also note that in the benchmark it is a gzip of the source so it is more about how well your source code compresses.

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