English's 'information density' is mainly due to the inference ability of the target. A human being infers an incredible amount of nuance from words and the ton

English's 'information density' is mainly due to the inference ability of the target. A human being infers an incredible amount of nuance from words and the tone/context in which they are delivered. Programming languages are formal specifications of instructions to a machine. They have to be incredibly deterministic/unambiguous because the machine does no inference of it's own. Even with a so called 'high level language' that handles a lot of under-the-hood stuff like memory allocation and garbage collection for you, there are no intuitive leaps. If you wrote the algorithm in English, but made sure to be rigidly unambiguous, you'd probably find the English version to be not so short.