I can’t help but think that all this LOC stuff is just a load of bollocks. For productivity to be affected by the amount of typing you do, you have to be typing an awful lot. All the studies I’ve ever seen suggest that the average programmer’s number of correct lines of code produced per day is in the order of 20 (lines that actually do something, not counting autogenerated lines, eg by IDE form designers, or extra syntactic fluff).
20 lines. Per day. But you spend all day typing, right? No you don’t. And when you are typing, you aren’t always writing new code, are you? No.
If conciseness was the ultimate measure of productivity we’d all be using Forth or APL.
Scripting languages may be all very well for trivial applications, but most applications are huge. It is far more important that our code be readable (by others as well as ourselves). Code that is easy to understand is much more productive in the end, no matter what the language. OO languages tend to score better when it comes to features supporting programing in the large.
Examples like the one given here lead only to pointless arguments over people’s favourite language/syntax/code layout/naming conventions. It is completely irrelevant to a discussion of productivity.