[ingenter]

> "Only short programs have any hope of being correct"

Right, but I would not minimize the number of bytes in a program, but rather the number of nodes in AST: http://www.paulgraham.com/arcchallenge.html

Here's an exercise: parse your favorite APL program into an AST, and see how many nodes it has.

[dang]

Almost certainly still relatively few.

There's something to be said for being able to see more code at once, too. This is something the vector language people emphasize (also Chuck Moore, IIRC). The APL/J/K style is a different way of both writing and reading code, and the standard objections ("readability", "that looks like line noise") mostly are just because of the gap between that experience and the more mainstream way of experiencing code.

Btw we once had a long HN discussion about pg's suggestion that one should measure code size in tokens rather then lexically. I remember arguing in favor but being persuaded out of it by someone who was even more radical about small codebases than I am.