The fact that even the pythonistas are now adopting types suggests that verbosity is much less of a concern than a bunch of spaghetti code that cannot be tested, understood, or refactored. You have to squint really, really hard to think that the people who chose type-less languages over Java ten years ago actually made the right choice. Personally, when diving into codebase its "verbosity" has never been an actual issue. Nor has lack of "expressive power." Of much greater concern is how well modularized it is, how well the modules are encapsulated, and how well the intentions of the original authors were captured. Here verbosity and types in particular have been absolutely invaluable. I suspect in the end this is why serious development at scale (involving many programmers over decades) will never occur in "highly expressive" languages like lisp and to a lesser extent, ruby etc. It is simply not feasible.