> In my experience ease of reading code is not a function of verbosity, but a function of familiarity.

You would think so, sure. I used to write Perl code and I was extremely familiar with it and it used to be pretty easy for me to hack a script. Going back after couple of months and trying to understand it though, was a totally different animal.

You can argue that it was my fault for writing bad Perl code, but ask any old farts who ever had to write Perl.