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We are not compression algorithms! If we were, we could replace the most common block of boilerplate code with token 'A', the second-most block of boilerplate c

We are not compression algorithms! If we were, we could replace the most common block of boilerplate code with token 'A', the second-most block of boilerplate code with token 'B,' and so on, writing programs in very few bytes. God have mercy on anyone trying to debug such a program, though. Any language with no boilerplate at all is a black box of incomprehensibility. Java has, I think, more boilerplate than average, while some other languages have less boilerplate than average. IDEs can help with some of this, which is why I finally stopped writing all code in vim.

AnimaLibera 4y ago
Allowing to compress code this much is the goal of golfing languages (such as 05AB1E (or osabie) or Pyth (not Python)). The code golf stack exchange forum contains a lot of programming challenges where the goal is to write the shorest program (in bytes) that does what the challenge asks, and some answers are truly impressive, with somewhat non-trivial algorithms being implemented in as few as 4 bytes (in extreme cases). Granted, these are programming challenges and not production code to be deployed, and some golfing languages are designed for a specific kind of task or algorithm that may let us think that the algorithm was actually pre-implemented in the language (and sometimes it is kinda true), but still, worth taking a look at it.