terseness

The terseness is because it was originally developed to be written on a blackboard while lecturing.

Could you post any comparison code demonstrating the terseness, or suggest a good site that might demonstrate this?

Math is hard, and the terseness of mathematical notational conventions is one of the things that makes it so.

Didn't mean to scold; was just explaining my terseness.

One solution is to optimize shell programming for terseness, since it has to be so interactive.

Java has a reputation for many things, but terseness of syntax is not one of them.

A language with an extremely strange syntax, apparently engineered for terseness on the smallest possible scale.

And yes, Stepanov complains about the lack of terseness and expressiveness in C++ as well.

Non-standard character set aside; is the terseness (one-letter commands and such) partly because of the slow input devices at the time?

If there's anything good about Java is that its terseness allows for loads of optimizations.

Perl's ugly terseness is arguably an advantage for that use case.

I was referring to its terseness, simplicity, extensibility and the large ecosystem surrounding it.

The overall terseness, neatness, and quality of the code is what matters rather than the "coolness" of the tools.

I wonder if these two can be separated: if a textbook could be Rudin-style in logical unity, terseness, and beauty and yet not "hide the scaffolding".

Was chuckling at Herstein and Neveu above, but I must interject about Rudin here - I wasn't aware "terseness" was the largest principal component of your analysis of "good technical writing" - how about Apostol instead?

XML is relatively verbose, but this is by design and is clearly stated as design goal #10: "Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance." The grammar for XML serialization itself clearly has 1-character lookahead structure, so the parser must be deterministic and thus work in linear time.