I disagree. "Real" programming languages attempt to be understandable by choosing and building around an appropriate set of abstractions for their purpose.; it's true that some were designed around various types of resource constraints based on the environments for which they were designed that involve terse expression of the abstractions, bit that's done to make them usable in that environment, not to “wrap spooky robes” around the programmers.

And excessive verbosity can be as much of an impediment to clarity as excessive terseness.