[userbinator]

Within a single language there's already considerable stylistic variance. I used to work in CS education and marked assignments, and I would see variances in length of students' (correct) solutions, for relatively trivial problems, that spanned a range of several multiples; e.g. what someone would take 50 lines to solve, someone else might need over 300. Part of it is comments and whitespace, but unnecessary abstractions also contribute to making code more "bloaty" than it could be.

[wwweston]

It isn't just students. The classic Knuth vs McElroy comparison shows that the right abstractions can matter quite a bit:

http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg...