Boilerplate Tax - Ranking popular programming languages by density
Summary
The post analyzes boilerplate density across programming languages using the Unique Lines of Code (ULOC) metric via the scc tool, applied to top GitHub repositories by language. It employs an AI-assisted Python script to gather data, then presents SQL-based queries and results showing Lisp-family languages at the high end of density, with Java being relatively DRY and Go/Rust showing similar redundancy. The piece concludes with interpretations, caveats about sample bias, and an invitation for others to reproduce and extend the analysis.