It probably depends on the work being done — matrix computations likely wouldn't be significantly shorter in Python, even with numpy — but considering the java styles I know of (rather defensive and comparatively low-level) and the Python styles I also know of, as long as your python isn't java I'd say it should remain significantly shorter. Not as short as replacing 20 LOC by a single namedtuple, that's a bit extreme, but 2x is what I expect of (mostly) translating java code into python, that's the rough overhead of the language itself when saying the same thing the same way.
"[..] as long as your python isn't java I'd say it should remain significantly shorter."
My intent with the post was to create empiric knowledge, I'm not a follower of the idea anecdotal 'evidence' trumps all that is pervasive in our industry. So thanks for your opinion, but I'm not interested in the least in anecdotes when comparing languages.
