A language that is unable to solve the problems would not be listed at all I was pointing out the absurdity of using these two criteria in isolation to judge l

A language that is unable to solve the problems would not be listed at all I was pointing out the absurdity of using these two criteria in isolation to judge languages, turns out there are other important things like finishing correctly, number of bugs, and clarity, not compactness. I don't think the ideal language can be judged on two criteria (or that there is an ideal language for everyone). However, I completely disagree that verbosity isn't a major detractor to readability, since it introduces a lot of noise that detracts from what actually happens Sure I agree extreme verbosity can be terrible too. So also can extreme terseness, unless it closely matches the problem domain, because otherwise now you have two problem domains you have to be familiar with in order to get work done - the actual problem domain, and the jargon invented by the programmer/language in order to solve it. This depends partly on the person reading and their preference for abstraction.