As in, the fewer pages, the more concise they are? What about clarity, and which languages are we talking about? Bonus points for Java? I think it’s been fairly well determined that LoC isn’t a good metric for judging productivity.
I think LoC has been determined to be a bad productivity metric because it’s gameable and incentivizes bad behavior. However, that doesn’t apply here as the engineers didn’t know they were going to be evaluated by LoC a priori. I struggle to think of cases were lines-changed wouldn’t be correlated with the productivity of engineers working in a consistent environment if they weren’t trying to game the system.
The problem is some languages are more verbose than others. Considering boilerplate (which is often automated these days) it extra has nothing to do with productivity. More lines doesn't mean more action - I mean, we're on a Lisp-derivative forum.
And sure, if I was getting judged by LoC I'd just paste in a library versus including it, which would generally be worse.
