Hi Jeff,
Thanks for the trackback. I’ll try to answer/defend some of what I said.
To Marty, Yes I would never count a bracket as a line of code (unless I was being paid per line of code of course)
To Matt, obviously as I pointed out, this was not a rigorous scientific analysis of languages. The IEEE paper has that if you want it. I agree that the work loop is very similar in all languages, its the amount of Object creation/initialisation sit-ups that you have to do that weight down the OO languages.
To Josh: I agree, but I would say that perl/python provides libraries written by hackers for hackers, and as a result they tend to handle many things in a far more concise manner.
Just for reference, I am a PhD student researching Computer Science Education. Many questions I regularily deal with are along the lines of “How many languages should we teach”, “what is the best language to teach first”,
“what is the one language all students should now”
“Should we teach the libraries or just the language”.
Many of these are cut and dry issues (for me at least), but I must say I find the notion that the IDE is more important than the language very interesting. Something I will think more about.
I must confess I only starting reading this blog today, but I will stick to it. It is very interesting stuff.