I like conciseness. Syntactic sugar increases the amount of code I can fit on a single screen, which increases the amount of code I can read without scrolling. Eye saccades are a hell of a lot faster than keyboard scrolling, so not having to scroll is a good thing. However, I recently realized that simple absolute size is actually the wrong metric with which to judge language verbosity, or at least not the most important one.

Here are links related to a few interesting studies that came up in a discussion with Ross. I figured I’d post them here so I have somewhere to point other people: Marshmallows and Delayed Gratification Walter Mischel did a study where he put children in a room, gave them single marshmallow, and told them that if they held off from eating the marshmallow for a while they would get two marshmallows later.