Their way of doing things seems to require a 1000 times less code than current mainstream techniques. They can do a whole language stack in less than 2000 lines of self-implementing code for instance (not super-optimized, but fast enough). Compare with GCC or GHC. Even Lua is bigger.
Speaking of terseness, reminds me of Prolog. I remember thinking how beautiful the solutions are but how broken my brain is as I couldn't come up with them on my own. I could see the final result that someone else produced and understand it, but struggle for hours and hours myself.
I think at some point levels of meta and abstractions can go that high that only very few smart individuals can effectively create products, others more or less hit a wall.
While "the rest of us" could hit a wall at creating such code, we may well be able to modify it. I've seen some Nile code for the graphic stack of the STEPS project, and what startled me was the sheer clarity of it. Syntax and semantics seemed just obvious.
When the teacher is a genius, the student needs not be bright.
Their way of doing things seems to require a 1000 times less code than current mainstream techniques. They can do a whole language stack in less than 2000 lines of self-implementing code for instance (not super-optimized, but fast enough). Compare with GCC or GHC. Even Lua is bigger.