I agree that “terse” and “simple” are not interchangeable terms and should not be confused. There are many situations in Bash that allow too much flexibility to be terse which hurts readability. And Perl, well, that’s on another level of being non-readable. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Perhaps I didn’t use the most realistic examples but I personally believe each of them are quite readable and hence, I used the term, “simple” or “simplest”. Readability was definitely taken into consideration and at the end of the day, it also partially depends on the developer to write scripts in a way that favors readability. With all that said, perhaps that’s also a reason why V would be a great replacement for bash in many instances because it’s simple, not terse, yet still fast?