I was going to say: but a project like tarsnap, by its nature, is going to have a particularly high ratio of ideas to loc. However, even in a language like C,

I was going to say: but a project like tarsnap, by its nature, is going to have a particularly high ratio of ideas to loc. However, even in a language like C, whose basic building blocks are much simpler than those available in a Lisp, and even when writing a routine program with no fancy math or theory behind it — if one finds oneself having to write lots of loc per thought, then one is doing it wrong: and one stops and thinks, and works out a way to abstract out the drudgery with more sophisticated data structures and preprocessor macros, or whatever.