On "concise syntax" - this works well when your vocabulary is large. But when you have to search for an English word that's sorta-like what you want to do, and

On "concise syntax" - this works well when your vocabulary is large. But when you have to search for an English word that's sorta-like what you want to do, and then contort the definition to fit the algorithm, readability suffers. For example, JavaScript's Array.join() and SQL's JOIN are radically different concepts and the definitions are not interchangeable, only tangentially related in the respect that all the information being 'join'ed ends up in one [maybe larger] pile. With respect to the article, concision looks like an artifact of standard practices by the languages users rather than any part of the language specification. One can be just as concise in ObjC (or C or Java), but the tradeoff is still readability.