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I would push back on the interpretation that syntactic sugar, by virtue of making programs shorter, is more expressive. APL folds entire compositions into single character sequences, but one would probably not argue that it is more expressive than Brainfuck.

Rather, it seems expressiveness as used in common parlance is closer to ease of comprehension. We like programs that are easy to "think of", that are "natural" to write in that they are succinct and "natural" to read in that they mimic what you are conceptually trying to accomplish. This has very little to do with programming language design and more the experience of the language user - aesthetics, really.




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