Do you know if he meant larger as in 'wc -c' larger, or as in number of symbols larger? I'm curious because there are languages (Cobol, Obj-C) that are extremely verbose in terms of characters but not in symbols.
The classic study cited in Mythical Man Month (which I don't unfortunately have handy) said, if I'm remembering it correctly, that it was proportional to lines of code (thus 'wc -l' larger) and independent of the language used.
What I don't know is whether IDE-generated code gets you out of that problem or not.
He was quoting Fernando Corbato who was comparing lines of assembly to lines of PL/I in large projects. Corbato later recalls this in an article in Byte. Crobato's Law is mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_J._Corbat%C3%B3
