[AnimalMuppet]

I think the real issue is total cognitive load.

There's the cognitive load of the language itself. There's the cognitive load of the libraries. There's the cognitive load of the algorithm. And there's the cognitive load of the actual code (number of lines times how hard each line is to read - smart coding conventions help quite a bit here).

But it's not that simple, because people are different. Different people have different cognitive load when presented with the same language. I think this is one of the reasons Haskell is so polarizing - it either has a low cognitive load for you, or a very high one. And if it has a very high one, you're not likely to spend the time and effort to get to the point where it has a low cognitive load for you.

> I feel like there must be some diminishing returns on making a language too expressive, implicit, and/or convenient but I don't have any real evidence to prove such.

I think that going to far in any of those directions probably increases total cognitive load, by making some other component worse.

[Chris2048]

I think it's incorrect to point at just the languages though, I feel many methodologies or standards help/hinder this too. And tools. And even, to some extent, communication and/or culture (culture of communication).