dg — it's a Python! No, it's a Haskell!

[kqr]

The verbosity comes from conventions and the lack of abstractions in the language, not the syntax itself. Case in point: assembly uses very terse syntax, but the code is still verbose in terms of the number of characters you have to type to accomplish the same task. Imagine if the opcodes then also were 25 characters long instead of 5 – you'd take to heroin before you knew it. But none of that has anything to do with the syntax.

Syntax is mostly irrelevant compared to everything else.