We all know and love (!) the leaderboard, but how about a different method?
One can solve a problem with a simple, naive method resulting in a short program and long runtime, or put in lots of explicit optimizations for more code and shorter runtime. (Or if you’re really good, a short, fast program!)
I propose the line-second.
Take the number of lines in your program (eg, 42 lines) and the runtime (eg 0.096 seconds). Multiply these together to get a score of 4.032 line-seconds.
A smaller score is a shorter, faster program.
Similarly, (for a particular solver), a larger score is a “harder” problem.
Another wrinkle is how do you count the lines? I’ve done several of this year’s AoC in “one line” of JavaScript because you can just chain split().map().reduce().filter() etc. together indefinitely. Some languages like JS or python can do so much in one line
I probably should have made it clearer this is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek proposal :)
You’re quite right - pretty much any program can be golfed into a single line.