Practical Aspect of Expressiveness of a Language

By Xah Lee. Date: 2016-07-27. Last updated: 2016-07-28.

there are 2 senses of expressiveness of a language.

(1) ratio of power over code length.
(2) how much stuff is builtin (aka how big is the included battery).

computer scientists and elite hackers, typically think about (1). Languages that excel here include: Scheme Lisp, Haskell.

for mathematicians and average programers, (2) is the most practical and important. languages that excels here includes: PHP, Java, and Wolfram Language (aka Mathematica).

(Wolfram Language happens to be also expressive of code length, better than haskell.)