FAUST leads to shorter programs for a few reasons, one of them is certainly its pure functional nature.

The other reasons I think FAUST programs are shockingly short:

- It's a DSL for signal processing that overloads single character identifiers with commonly used signal processing functions (+ sums multiple signals, < splits into two signals, etc.). And, of course, it has a very powerful standard library of signal processing related functions.

- The boilerplate for getting signals in and out are handled by the language/compiler, rather than the programmer. You don't need to setup a ring buffer to receive an input/output signal or whatever...FAUST does it automagically. Even with very helpful libraries, such as JUCE, you're still doing a lot of the same tasks for every new signal processing program.

One could do these other two things in another language, even some imperative ones, I think. But, this is among the most concise tools for writing signal processing code I've seen. I only found it yesterday, so have only started reading the docs (and there's some math concepts I need to review before I can make sense out of some of the more advanced examples), but I was really struck by what a cool combination of pragmatism and purity FAUST is. It spits out the ugly stuff, so you can still readily use it in real world programs that are used by non-programmers.

It's also got a real-time experimental environment, so you can tweak your program in semi-realtime and immediately hear and see results. And, by "see" results, I mean it has a diagramming tool that spits out a block diagram of your function(s). I'm amazed it took me this long to find FAUST, as I've been reading up on this kind of programming for a couple of weeks, and it seems pretty clear it's the best thing going.