Succinctness is *not* power
The following is my response to a recent post on lambda-the-ultimate.org concerning one of Paul Graham’s essays. The question is, is succintness power?
For most users of computer languages (software developers) programming languages are for specifying the implementation of software systems that are correct and easily maintainable. Succinctness is at the bottom of a long list of desirable qualities.
To test the truthfulness of the “succinctness is power” hypothesis we simply need to consider the case of any maximally succinct language. That would be a language with maximum information content (i.e. no more compression is possible). Such a language would clearly be utterly unusable.
While I agree that some degree of succinctness is important (clearly we don’t want the expression of basic algorithms to be an order of magnitude longer than it should be) the challenge with developing software isn’t writing the code, it is finding bugs and making changes. It is more important to the vast majority of software developers that languages make those tasks easier than to allow us to type as fast as possible.