I have generally felt that short programs feel more elegant and enjoyable -- as long as the "flow" of the program is clear immediately by looking at it. So PG's

I have generally felt that short programs feel more elegant and enjoyable -- as long as the "flow" of the program is clear immediately by looking at it. So PG's emphasis on brevity is correct, I think. The other problems people talk about (make this refactorable, etc. etc.) are essentially problems which arise when we transition from a small code base to a large one. And to have any insight about that, I suspect we will actually need to first build something truly large in Arc. Without doing that, arguments from both sides will just be fanciful and sensationalistic blog crud. New languages are designed so that we can think differently. Let's first try to honestly think about such an artifact and see if we can express it easily using Arc. Hack first, folks, then talk.