Terse is generally better than verbose but it has 2 problems: 1. Learning curve - most of the people immediately dismiss what they can't intuitively understand

Terse is generally better than verbose but it has 2 problems: 1. Learning curve - most of the people immediately dismiss what they can't intuitively understand straight away, even if it requires just some minutes to grok and a cheatsheet during first days of usage. People need to have at least very basic clue immediately to get interested and feel motivated to invest further attention. 2. Terse syntax/vocabulary encourages packing overly complex logic into one-liners which become brainfuck to read and reason about even for yourself shortly after. I believe it's not hard to develop automatic decoders for such expressions which would split them into multiple lines introducing intermediate variables, structure them with indentation and/or highlight corresponding elements but people probably prefer to just read the code immediately rather than to use advanced tooling even to read it. I indeed adore `x ? y : z` and similar things and use these heavily but always split the expressions in separate indented lines every time I nest them. Some times I also use ReSharper to convert some verbose C# code I wrote into much shorter (Linq or something) but in not-so-rare cases I then fail to understand the result and have to remember/comment what does it do. I would often revert to verbose unless I'm sure this part of the code is not going to need to be debugged ever after.