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.
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.