I don't understand the extreme focus on brevity, though it does seem to be mentioned regularly. In practice I don't notice a difference between "begin" and "{".

I don't understand the extreme focus on brevity, though it does seem to be mentioned regularly. In practice I don't notice a difference between "begin" and "{". It's not something I have to think about, and my typing speed exceeds the speed at which I'm able to determine what to type next. I understand avoiding excessive amounts of large boiler plate where standard patterns are constantly repeated for no particular reason, but that's not a comparable situation to individual keywords.