In his stimulating paper, Succinctness is Power, Paul Graham argues that
[i]f smaller source code is the purpose of high-level languages, and the power of something is how well
it achieves its purpose, then the measure of the power of a programming language is how small it makes
your programs.
Moreover,
[t]his metric needs fleshing out, and it could require interpretation in the case of specific languages, but I
think it tries to measure the right thing, which is the number of parts a program has. I think the [parse]
tree you'd draw in this exercise is what you have to make in your head in order to conceive of the program,
and so its size is proportionate to the amount of work you have to do to write or read it