I agree with your overall argument that less code = better. What I don't agree with is that that conclusively demonstrates good design. I think all of the scr

I agree with your overall argument that less code = better. What I don't agree with is that that conclusively demonstrates good design. I think all of the scripting languages have design problems that were solved before the languages were ever written. For what it's worth, I don't consider Java well designed either. All of it's insights already existed elsewhere [1]. Lines of code is also a bad metric. You have to also count characters, etc. There was a study that did just this for C++, Java and Smalltalk. Java was 3 times more concise than C++ and Smalltalk 3 times more concise than Java. [1] Interfaces would be the closest Java was to inventing something but Smalltalk had these informally (and some environments would let you work with them directly).