Just counting the tokens in the codetree is not an acceptable measure of brevity, because it implies that adding primitives to a language always makes it more p

Just counting the tokens in the codetree is not an acceptable measure of brevity, because it implies that adding primitives to a language always makes it more powerful as long it makes your application shorter just once. But adding primitives has a cost too. You could just have let, or you could have a let for one value, one for more values, one for more values initialized as nil, or as 0, or as an empty string, etc. In Ruby I write expressions like this a lot: condition ? string : "" I'd like to say: condition &&? string This would make my applications shorter, but, I claim, less readable and no more powerful. To measure power, it is not enough to look at succinctness - you must hold something else constant too.