People think in terms of hierarchy and concepts, not individual components. For example, cars with more internal components are not actually more difficult to DRIVE than simpler cars (eg: carburetor vs fuel injection).
Likewise, people don't pay by the character. They pay by the word. They also pay by the concept, so having N different ways to do something simple can be a higher cognitive burden than just 1 way. (hence python vs perl).
Now, I believe that clear code, "well designed" code (despite the fact that its patently obvious that no one agrees on what well designed actually MEANS) are better. Good abstractions.
But these are a function of the programmer from which they come from. The programming language makes a difference but I'm starting to suspect beyond a certain point of feature completeness, you are hitting diminishing returns then negative returns. Yes Java8 has Lambdas, that helps a lot. But would Java9 benefit from implicit parameters? Or from nearly any punctuation being an operator that can be overridden? I argue these 2 features of scala, which people love for their ability to build concise, hard to read, harder to write, DSLs are part of the problem.
Ok enough ranting. My parting shot is I write a 25,000 lines of scala into a production system. We had to rewrite ALL the for loops into while loops. In the end, I'd say Scala was generally helpful but not so much that I'd do it again.
