Conciseness Conjecture

From OnExpressivePower:

Programs in more expressive programming languages, that use additional facilities in a sensible manner contain fewer programming patterns than equivalent programs in less expressive programming languages

The above observation/conjecture belongs to MatthiasFelleisen, and I think it is very important to keep in mind when discussing issues related to programming languages, design and patterns.

For example? Othwerwise i don't know what it means. Words like sensible and facilities sap a statement of meaning.

OnExpressivePower has a very nice example just before this conjecture. I think that we should duplicate the effort here only if we find a more illustrative example or if we find counterexamples. The assertion being made is that patterns in the code are a bad thing.

This is a link to a link that is a long paper. A good example here would be useful.

PaulGraham said "Peter Norvig found that 16 of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were 'invisible or simpler' in Lisp.", which sounds like a rather similar notion. http://www.norvig.com/design-patterns/