The "crude measure" that you cite which "ranks C at 1, Java at 2, Python at 5 (roughly)" shows that on average, every line of code in Python is worth 5 lines of

The "crude measure" that you cite which "ranks C at 1, Java at 2, Python at 5 (roughly)" shows that on average, every line of code in Python is worth 5 lines of C. Let assume that this is true. Naturally, this seems to imply that more powerful languages require less code to perform the same task. Python provides a good example of this, but it is not always true. C is not a very expressive language. It is often cited as a portable assembly. Yet, decades of unix/GNU utilities show that powerful programs can be written in small amounts of C, which are combined to build elegant and decoupled systems. Java is more expressive line by line, but its implementation of OOP requires so much boilerplate that it requires no less code than C to represent the same simple design as the C equivalent. Additionally, because each line of Java represents 2 lines of C, the resulting programs are far less efficient. It is important to consider why this true. Java attempts to abstract many of the details of the underlying C implementation, allowing it to be much more expressive. This abstraction allows the higher level programmer to think about business logic rather than pointer arithmetic. However, these abstractions constrain the programmer's ability to write code that the language designer hadn't considered. Of course, you might consider these to be edge cases and that is a fair point. However, crippling the outliers pushes your userbase towards mediocrity. As pg stated: "when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low."