Which programming languages are most token-efficient?

https://martinalderson.com/posts/which-programming-languages-are-most-token-efficient/

The author found a nice simple way to answer the question: measure the token count for Rosetta Code problems which have solutions in all the languages they were interested in.

Short and thoughtful blog.

There was a very meaningful gap of 2.6x between C (the least token efficient language I compared) and Clojure (the most efficient).

Unsurprisingly, dynamic languages were much more token efficient (not having to declare _any_types saves a lot of tokens) - though JavaScript was the most verbose of the dynamic languages analysed.

What did surprise me though was just how token efficient some of the functional languages like Haskell and F# were - barely less efficient than the most efficient dynamic languages.

• Martin Alderson

via mjd in re this github blog post, which includes one of my least-favorite argument styles:

Is type safety that big of a deal?

Yes!

Next question.

It feels contemptuous of any reader who might have a different opinion. It's totally okay to decide not to legislate this question in every article about type-safe programming (or dynamic programming!) but please for the love of your readers, don't patronize them.

(I like the author of the piece! Just hate this argument-from-authority)