My first impulse - after playing some programming/optimization games over the morning - was: Is these just one kind of efficiency for a language? For example,

My first impulse - after playing some programming/optimization games over the morning - was: Is these just one kind of efficiency for a language? For example, mandarin or japanese can be very short on the character count. However, this increases character complexity and makes the languages harder to learn. On the other hand, large parts of english tend to be simple to learn.