If we accept your premises, it actually encourages the flamewar; if you think you're favorite language is being unfairly maligned by those brevity obsessed func

If we accept your premises, it actually encourages the flamewar; if you think you're favorite language is being unfairly maligned by those brevity obsessed functional programmers, then the results in Kolmogorov complexity can give you hope that there is a shorter program in your language you can use as evidence against them. ;) In the real world, there are lots of trade-offs at play when writing programs, and obviously brevity is not the only thing to optimize for. However, I think there is substantial empirical evidence that there is strong correlation between the length of a program and the number of bugs in it.