When designing a programming language, your absolute primary goal must be choosing a set of paradigms and conventions that makes writing a hello world program as short as possible, without compromising overall functionality. Before you do anything else, do this. It's a very good litmus test for base-level verbosity. Also: 1. Verbosity is a subcategory of complexity. 2. All general properties and axioms that apply for complexity, applies for verbosity. 3. Complexity for the sake of convetion is always bad. 4. Language-induced complexity must always sublinearly scale with functionality.