I was looking at code.golf the other day and I wondered which languages were the least verbose, so I did a little data gathering.
I looked at 48 different languages that had completed 79 different code challenges on code.golf. I then gathered the results for each language and challenge. If a "golfer" had more than 1 submission to a challenge, I grabbed the most recent one. I then dropped the top 5% and bottom 5% to hopefully mitigate most outliers. Then came up with an average for each language, for each challenge. I then averaged the results across each language and that is what you see here.
For another perspective, I ranked each challenge then got the average ranking across all challenges. Below is the results of that.
Disclaimer: This is in no way scientific. It's just for fun. If you know of a better way to sort these results please let me know.
Assembly would be lower. You have more complex / direct instructions in assembly. Brain fuck is pretty much just a pure turing machine, and has 8 instructions.
X86 has ~ 1000 + variants. Even ARM with a smaller instruction set has 232 instructions.
In brain fuck to set a number you'd have to count up (or down - underflow) to that number. In assembly you just set it.
Somewhere I've read that current assembly code with Makros should be similar to writing C.