[chongli]

>Perhaps you don't value verbosity, but fans of Flaubert, Balzac, Henry James, Joyce, Poe, Dostoyevsky and Dickens would disagree with you.

I don't value verbosity and I do appreciate the works of those authors: I do not consider them verbose. Verbosity is not a measure of the absolute length of a document; it's relative to a minimum expression of an idea. Per this definition, all verbosity is unnecessary because it conveys no additional information.

[grey-area]

I do not consider them verbose

What a curious statement. James did not consider the 'minimum expression of an idea' a virtue, he's almost infamous for his verbosity, as are many of the others in that list. I'll leave you with something from the start of The Ambassadors as an example:

The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive--the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe.

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/hjames/bl-hjam...

[chongli]

I don't consider that verbose at all. It expresses a great deal more information than you're giving it credit. It would not be easy to pare down without destroying this information. Thus, it is very close to the minimum expression of the intended idea.

[TheAnimus]

One mans verbosity is another's great literary detail.

The same is true for programming languages, the fact some languages make you two say 2 lines, to achieve what another language does with one, can itself be a benefit or not. It might force the developer to make the same mistake twice, otherwise resulting in a compiler error. Or it might allow extra space for a mistake to creep in.

It is the perspective of the users and the context that determine if something is right or not. This project has apparently 14,000 classes, with about 3,500,000 lines of code. It is verbose, but it is also very manageable. A smaller more 'intelligent' less static language would make working with this a lot harder.