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Using an example from a benchmarking suite to illustrate language conciseness doesn't make any sense. We all know that conciseness is inversely proportional to speed. Whoever wrote that Java code was trying to write the most performant, not the most concise code. He did a great job, by the way, since for that particular benchmark, Java outperforms Ruby by a factor of 20! (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=sum...)

Sorry for initially assuming that you wrote the code. I wasn't familiar with that site, so I didn't register your original allusion to it.



Au contraire, the very fact that the programming benchmark site neither rewards or punishes conciseness makes it a good place to see how important it is to the average programmer when also dealing with an explicit performance criteria.

Also, I think your statement that conciseness is inversely proportional to speed is rarely true. It certainly doesn't hold for the programming examples at the shootout site.




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