One thing the author's missing is a consideration of how often a system is used vs. how often it's learned. Let's just take one example from the article. Would it have been better if `sed` had been named `streamEditor` from the start?

sed was written in 1973. Think about that, it's been around for half a century. It's regularly used by millions across generations. Imagine how many countless man-hours have been saved from naming it "sed" instead of "streamEditor"? And I'm not just talking about typing code, but also reading code.

Yes "sed" is pretty inscrutable if you don't know Unix. But pretty much any Unix developer or sysadmin instantly recognized "sed" the same way they would a common English word. Very few people just use the Unix command line tools a few times, then forget about them. Once you learn Unix, chances are you'll keep using it for decades. And for those people, their brains almost certainly parse "sed" much faster than they would "streamEditor".

So, I think here's the lesson. The utility of terseness is very much related to the relative balance of expert users vs novice leaners. If you expect your system to mostly be repeat power-users, then terseness is very good. Systems that are around for decades, used widely by thousands, and general-purpose frameworks tend to fall in this category. In contrast, a high percentage of your user's man hours may just be people getting acquainted with the system. Maybe it's an application that solves some niche corner case, and most people use it once or twice then forget about it. Or maybe it's some internal software, where corporate turnover means that most devs working on it at any given time are neophytes. In this case verbosity and explicitness is a very good thing. You're not trying to cater to power-users. You want things to be as clear as possible, even if it means a lot of typing and spelling errors and wasted screen space.

The challenge here is that you mostly need to make these decisions at the development stage. You have to try to predict what your user-profile will look like, before you actually have any users. I doubt the original authors of sed could have ever imagined how popular and lost-lasting it would become. But given that it has, there's no doubt they made the right choices.