not sure if i am saying the obvious here, but the reason that brevity is important is because it shows that you have the right abstractions. short code is a go

not sure if i am saying the obvious here, but the reason that brevity is important is because it shows that you have the right abstractions. short code is a good indication that it's done right - you've found the best way to express the problem and so don't need to say so much handling the parts that you have not captured well. if some languages are more verbose than others, then this can be for two reasons: first, they may just need more typing to say the same thing. this is not, in my opinion, a problem. second, they may lack ways of making abstractions that stop you from producing a good solution. that, in turn, leads to longer code (see above). this is a problem. so "verbose languages" are not in themselves bad. the problem is languages that don't support easy / sufficient abstraction. and brevity is a quick n easy way of measuring this. taking that further, and ignoring the practical issues, a strongly typed lisp might be more verbose if it required type annotations in some places. that wouldn't make it necessarily worse. in comparison, lisp without macros loses expressive power (in some vague sense) and so is worse (and gives longer code).