From: Alexey Verkhovsky <alex@...>
Date: 2005-04-19T14:35:19+09:00
Subject: Ruby vs Java experiment

It is obvious to anyone on this list that Ruby is more expressive than 
Java. But maybe someone is curious how much more expressive it is. Here 
is one data point:

CONTEXT
I was doing a ThoughtWorks coding problem this weekend. It's a part of 
TW recruiting process, and yeah, I must be another fowlbot wannabe :)
The problem was typical billing stuff. Read a plain text invoice file, 
parse it to name / quantity / price, validate, calculate some sales 
taxes. All the usual contortions of money arithmetics, some regexps, not 
much more. To be solved with standard libraries of the language.

The twist in the plot was that I was asked to do it both in Ruby and 
Java. I did that, first in Ruby and then ported the Ruby solution to 
Java. Exactly same functionality and very similar design. I consider 
myself familiar with both languages (not a world class wizard, but wrote 
quite a bit of code in either). And I don't hate Jav. So, it was a 
reasonably fair experiment.

DATA
For whatever it's worth, the line count:

Ruby: 238 lines, Java: 655 lines, ratio 1 : 2.75

These are simple \n counts, not NCCS or other such metrics, but I think 
any "amount of code" metric (as oposed to code complexity) would get a 
similar ratio.

P.S. I'm scared to think what would it take to implement the same 
solution in C (standard libraries only => no regexp to begin with).

-- 
Best regards,

Alexey Verkhovsky

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