I've also thought of the idea of using some LZ-based compression on source code files to determine which ones have the most redundancy (the ones that have the b

I've also thought of the idea of using some LZ-based compression on source code files to determine which ones have the most redundancy (the ones that have the best ratios) and could be simplified by refactoring, which is not too different from the entropy-based approach described here. It's worth noting that this also identifies languages that trend towards boilerplate and egregious verbosity --- for example, I've noticed that the average C# or Java codebase will compress much better than C, while (much) denser stuff like APL-family languages don't compress as much.