It was excessive to call it "silly" but program length still seems very imperfect way to measure the ease of writing programs in a given language. Better to directly measure things like programming time or number of bugs.

It's silly when you're measuring it in "lines of code", because "line" is a somewhat arbitrary construct, for which "chunks of text delimited by newlines" is a worse approximation than most people think. (Quick proof: in many languages, stripping out all the newlines yields an equivalent program, so that all programs are effectively one-liners.)