Oh, and regarding "how compact are your programs", well every time I see boilerplate code or reflection usage that cannot be refactored into something nice with

Oh, and regarding "how compact are your programs", well every time I see boilerplate code or reflection usage that cannot be refactored into something nice without sacrificing clarity and/or performance, I use meta-programming to generate it instead. Usual suspect here is any kind of "support" code, like serialization, RPC, dependency injection and such.