As other people have noted, this seems like a criticism of expression-heavy languages. I'm not sure the working memory idea really is a good argument for short

As other people have noted, this seems like a criticism of expression-heavy languages. I'm not sure the working memory idea really is a good argument for short lines. Assembly language is entirely short statements, and has only a few operands per line, but is so tedious to read because of how much state/working memory is occupied. Complex expressions can actually reduce the mental overhead by reducing the number of used variables to a minimum.