This is not about conciseness, it is more about lack of language evolution. Older, purely functional haskell ocaml or scheme is quite readable and quite concise

This is not about conciseness, it is more about lack of language evolution. Older, purely functional haskell ocaml or scheme is quite readable and quite concise. The main place where older code in readable languages (e.g. not J, common lisp, Perl) becomes hard to read is when new language conventions have replaced the old.