[the_af]

> That's simply not true, unless you're talking assembly-level of detail.

Modern language design (of the past few decades) seems to disagree with you, with a couple of exceptions. This debate involves a degree of subjectivity, of course, but it's generally false that it's "simply not true" that less verbosity and boilerplate hinders readability. The consensus seems to be the contrary. Even Java -- late in the game -- is adopting features to reduce its verbosity and improve its expressivity.

High-level language constructs and idioms only "hide" unnecessary detail; i.e. the detail where the only degree of control you have is the possibility to introduce bugs. You learn these idioms just like you learned what an if-else or a foor loop was.