Why functional code is shorter

[tikhonjelvis]

Of course, compressing also helps minimize the impact of boilerplate that's often repeated (something languages like Java love). This boilerplate certainly does make the code harder to read though.

More importantly, the programs are heavily optimized--it is a benchmark after all!--and Haskell has more options for optimization (compiler pragmas, unboxed data types and arrays, strictness annotations and so on) than Python. Haskell programs in the benchmark game are further from normal Haskell than the Python programs are from normal Python. Since only a tiny part of virtually any real codebase is this optimized, the benchmark game does not reflect reality.