The mahalanobis distance? http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/62092/bottom-to-top-explanation-of-the-mahalanobis-distance (habanero cookies answer)
Forgive me, but this is a discussion thread :-). On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 4:33 PM, Jason Merrill <[email protected]> wrote: > Number of tokens might be a more useful quantitative measure of concise > code than number of characters. But there's no simple number that can > substitute for good taste. > > On Monday, April 14, 2014 4:19:49 AM UTC-5, Mike Innes wrote: >> >> People often talk about code concision as if it's a simple case of number >> of characters or lines per idea / function / project / whatever. And sure, >> SLOC is an indicator of how expressive a language is, but a fundamentally >> flawed one because it conflates two distinct issues: (1), the number of >> distinct concepts you need to express an idea, and (2), the number of >> characters you need to express those concepts. >> >> map() isn't better than a for loop *because* it's short; it's better >> because it lets you express the same idea with only three concepts >> (functional + function + data). Shortness (in characters) is just a side >> effect. >> >> You couldn't improve Java by making every method and class name shorter, >> because then not only would you still need an insane number of concepts to >> write a simple hello world, but those concepts would be needlessly >> obfuscated. Take APL/J for contrast: these languages are concise both >> because of implicit function composition (cool) and because every function >> is one or two characters long (not so much). Julia hits the sweet spot >> here, I think, because it's expressive enough to be succinct without >> worrying about concision for its own sake. >> >> In the real world, typing is never the bottleneck – it might be if >> function names were hundreds of characters, but for one, three, even ten, >> choose clarity over concision every time. >> >
