I feel like someone should note the irony of finding this comment on HN, which is implemented in Arc: a language that was explicitly designed to be as terse as possible.
Terseness at different levels. Avoiding boilerplate syntax is good. Obscure abbreviated names of functions and operators just to save a few keystrokes is bad.
Btw. the definition of terseness in the essay seem specifically chosen to favor Lisp style languages.
2 + 3 * 4
is clearly terser than
(+ 2 (* 3 4))
But by counting "leafs" like he does (rather than say tokens), they get the same terseness-count.
http://www.paulgraham.com/arcchallenge.html