Something to consider: concision in the small vs. concision in the large.

That is, some languages focus on being concise for a specific expression. (Your Golfscript being an extreme example.) But in my experience, that’s the less-useful bit of concision: what’s really useful is being able to make the program as a whole more concise and readable — and that mostly comes down to Factorability.

I’m getting into hardcore FP now, and I’m starting to appreciate that this is the most important thing about the FP approach. Folks focus on immutability and such, but that’s actually missing the point. When I talk to the serious FP mavens, they tend to focus on the ability to perform completely arbitrary refactorings in good FP code. Used judiciously, that often makes for code that is both concise and readable…