[btilly]

I personally think that the poor methodology of this post would never have survived to see the light of day if the conclusions did not match what programmers expect. Conversely the methodological flaws mean that we should be very careful about accepting the data for any conclusion beyond, "Well, it looks like what I expect."

[rohern]

Fair enough. That is an entirely valid critique. However, I do not think this makes the article worthless. Given the apparent correlation between known expressiveness and the data derived here, it may be that they had a good notion using length-of-commit as a measure for expressiveness.

[lostnet]

> it may be that they had a good notion using length-of-commit as a measure for expressiveness.

Replace "expressiveness" with "author's anticipation of reviewer difficulty based on prevailing cultural biases" and you have a different conclusion for how authors size groups of changes that also matches the order graphed.

If you want literal expression-per-line why not just look at compressed_size/line_count for the available body of work in each language?