[jmcqk6]

>Does anyone here really doubt that you can get more done with a single line of Python than a line of C/Java/C++?

I've never understood this criticism before. Consider this line of python:

x = 3

To this line in C:

DoAllTheThings();

A single line of code is a bad comparison because it doesn't say anything about the underlying language or platform.

[rohern]

These are valid lines of code (plus or minus a ;) in both languages.

[jmcqk6]

That is exactly my point.

[rohern]

Well, then your point is to say that comparing two animals on the strength of their legs is ridiculous because both animals have legs. This is just a non sequitur. No one was confused about the fact that you can make a function call in C that does more than a variable assignment in Python.

We know a single line of code can do a lot of things in both languages. The question is what does the average line do. And this is important, because the occurrence of bugs is directly correlated with lines written rather than the complexity of those lines, and the same seems to be true for programmer productivity. So if 100 lines of Python does more than 100 lines of C, this is an important fact, as in first case more will have been accomplished for the same amount of work and the same debugging effort.

[jmcqk6]

No, my point is that comparing a single line of code is ridiculous. You can only get an understanding of the efficiency of a language when you look at many lines of code. I would think you would need a few thousand lines of code that did something non-trivial before the true picture emerges.

Not even when you come up with an answer will you be able to say something about a single line of code. Meaningful statements can only be made about lots of lines of code.

Except perhaps about vb. Screw that language.

[rohern]

Yeah, sure. That's what an average is. It is taking the performance of a large case and reducing it to a single unit in order to make comparisons.