I think that the author of this article is mistaking LOC for readability. Despite colorForth being wonderfully concise and independent of any operating system, that doesn't make it convenient or readable for future programmers. Just because something is a number of lines longer than another something, doesn't mean that it's less readable.

Take Perl, for example. I often write Perl scripts, and they're very few lines, but nobody can read them, which is really what matters. So, I'll expand it to be more C-like (calling functions with parentheses, using less implied arguments and scalar/vector contexts, etc.), thus making it very easily readable by people that don't even know Perl. I regard this revised version much better than the more Perl-like and obfuscated (although shorter!) version.