This is not about conciseness, it is more about lack of language evolution. Older, purely functional haskell ocaml or scheme is quite readable and quite concise.

The main place where older code in readable languages (e.g. not J, common lisp, Perl) becomes hard to read is when new language conventions have replaced the old.

I completely agree that much of the verbosity allows the language to express more, e.g. looking at a method signature in Java I know its visibility, what (if anything) it will return, what types I can/should pass it, and what exceptions it can throw...compare that to Ruby where the signature alone doesn't tell me any of that.

But there's also a lot of verbosity that adds no (or very little) value, e.g. System.out.println() instead of something like just println() or the several lines of boilerplate needed to run something in a new thread.