It seems to me that the author is attacking the wrong problem axes. I don&#x27;t think expressiveness or power are the problem here. I think the problem is lack of clarity.<p>Consider the discussion of terseness. What is the best way to explain something in Englush? Long winded or terse? Wrong axis. Explain things <i>clearly</i>. Expressing a concept perfectly with a small number of words the listener doesn&#x27;t understand is useless. Beating a dead horse is useless.<p>I have a huge problem with C because the same characters and keywords are reused in multiple different similar but different ways and it adds cognitive load to things that should be simple (eg declarations) -- leaving me less able to devote my limited mental faculties to the problem I am actually trying to solve. (Not singling out C, just picking a well known example.)<p>Languages that give you lots of redundant ways of doing things -- especially if some ways are better than others but not obviously so -- aren&#x27;t more powerful, they simply harder to understand. (This is not the same as arguing for newspeak — words that are similar but not the same are useful.)<p>What we want is clarity. Clarity isn&#x27;t simple or easy but it is exactly what we want in programming languages.