[ispolin]

Yeah, look at the JavaScript LOC! Who wrote the rosetta code for those, Brendan Eich?!

This hints at another way to optimize for this metric; make the language as expressive as possible. Less characters should translate into less typos. Paul Graham strikes again! (http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html)

As to your point about redundancy, I think the researchers are in agreement with you on that one if you consider unit tests to be a sort of redundancy, expressing the same concept in two different ways. They bring this up repeatedly in their report.

Obligatory Perl jab: It surprised me that any of the Perl solutions used more than one line. :-P