I just finished working on notes for a Java5/jUnit4/TDD tutorial. This is a version of a Ruby/rSpec/BDD tutorial that I recently wrote. The app is a simple “guess the secret code” game. The contexts of the two are the same other than where language differences make themselves known. Primarily this is the in code. So, two codebases, same set of tests/specs, same functionallity.. 100% same. Both written by me… which, IMO, means pretty clean, tight code.
I’ll be looking over the code in the next few days, and probably blogging anything interesting that I find. But I’ll start off with this comparison… just how much difference is there in the amount of code?
| Ruby | Java | % difference | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lines | 396 | 551 | 39% |
| Characters | 11479 | 16641 | 45% |
So, in Java there is almost 50% more code. In this case.. a simple app… that’s only about 5000 characters… but what about a bigger app? That will add up fast. I can’t help but wonder if that comparison will be linear with the size of the app. Somehow I doubt it.
