People often talk about code concision as if it's a simple case of number of characters or lines per idea / function / project / whatever. And sure, SLOC is an indicator of how expressive a language is, but a fundamentally flawed one because it conflates two distinct issues: (1), the number of distinct concepts you need to express an idea, and (2), the number of characters you need to express those concepts.
map() isn't better than a for loop *because* it's short; it's better because it lets you express the same idea with only three concepts (functional + function + data). Shortness (in characters) is just a side effect. You couldn't improve Java by making every method and class name shorter, because then not only would you still need an insane number of concepts to write a simple hello world, but those concepts would be needlessly obfuscated. Take APL/J for contrast: these languages are concise both because of implicit function composition (cool) and because every function is one or two characters long (not so much). Julia hits the sweet spot here, I think, because it's expressive enough to be succinct without worrying about concision for its own sake. In the real world, typing is never the bottleneck – it might be if function names were hundreds of characters, but for one, three, even ten, choose clarity over concision every time.
