  It is well-known, and often a topic of heated debates, that programs in some
programming languages are more concise than in others. This is a relevant
factor when comparing or aggregating volume-impacted metrics on source code
written in a combination of programming languages. In this paper, we present a
model for measuring the conciseness of programming languages in a consistent,
objective and evidence-based way. We present the approach, explain how it is
founded on information theoretical principles, present detailed analysis steps
and show the quantitative results of applying this model to a large benchmark
of diverse commercial software applications. We demonstrate that our metric for
language conciseness is strongly correlated with both an alternative analytical
approach, and with a large scale developer survey, and show how its results can
be applied to improve software metrics for multi-language applications.
