I am not aware of any strict mathematical definition of expressiveness of a language. Informally, a language is more expressive if it allows you to achieve the same with less keystrokes. From this point of view, for instance, Perl or Python are more expressive than C. Of course, you can't always achieve with Python most things that C is capable of at low level, and therefore one may question whether Python is really more capable than C. But capability has little to do with expressiveness. In certain domains, one language may be more expressive than the other, and in other it could be just vice versa. (For instance, Python is more expressive in string operations while C is more expressive in low-level raw data representation.)

One may notice, however, that the majority of languages are Turing complete, and you basically may express the same with all of them. What is the difference in expressiveness then, as seen by a Practicioner rather than a Computer Scientist?

I usually use the following criterion. If you write one non-splittable expression instead of a chain of statements, the language is more expressive. Compare the following two programs that compute a sum of an array in C:

...and in Ruby:

..and, in C, we also should find a place to deallocate the array when it's no longer needed.

You may notice that Ruby can achieve with a single expression what C needs several operators and variable declarations for. Three Ruby features contribute to this, anonymous lambda functions, syntax sugar to pass them to functions (such as inject), and to avoid the really useless variable declarations. Isn't it always that beautiful?

In some cases it's not.

What does it take, to log?

Now let's try to add some logging to the programs above. Assume we actually want to hook into the loop, and make it print the square result it has calculated to a logging stream.

Let's take a look at the code again.

C:

Ruby:

Ewww! Why does our Ruby code looks like C? Where is our one-liner? Where is the expressiveness? How come we're explicitly introducing a temporary variable just like in C?

I spotted such patterns, "compute-log-return" in a lot of places in my practice. For i instance, the BLAST codebase I maintain, contains these here and there, because it's written in an expressive functional language (OCaml), and uses logging as a primary debugging mechanism. Because of it, the code that should look beautiful looks as an old prostitute trying to mask their weary skin with tons of makeup, and I'm not happy with this.

Trying to get asleep on a plane, I suddenly realized that this logging could be achieved with a better code. Since "assign-debugprint-return" is a recurring pattern, let's define a helper function

Then, the resultant Ruby code will look like this:

Now our Ruby code looks like Ruby again.

Of course, this is not limited to Ruby. Though less versatile, the sane function may be implemented for the C code as well.

And this brings us back to the original comparison with 1 line in Ruby and five--in C.

Discussion

while you may write such function for a less expressive language (as seen above), it will "stand out" in a large C code sheet and look like ugly duckling. What may benefit most are languages that mix functional and imperative coding styles, such as the aforementioned Ruby and OCaml. The reason why this helper might be useful is that it's relevant to the functional languages in two different ways.

First, functional language allow the programmer to define anonymous function inline, which makes them be frequently passed as parameters to other functions. In C, defining a separate function is, inmost cases, uglier than just adding a convenient logging shortcut.

Second, logging an intermediate result contradicts the functional level paradigm. In functional languages you define a computation as a whole rather than specify concrete sequence of actions. In case of logging, you have to violate a chain of functions with a side-effect operation. Of course, you can try to make it look nice, as we did, but the very reason we need the kludge is that we're doing something a bit wrong.

But it's not limited to functional languages. Most expressive languages that do not require from user a strict specification of type of every identifier can. For example, we might want to debug Perl's regular expression substitution with using a similar function:

(we couldn't use log because it conflicted with the mathematical logarithm function that bears the same name).

***

In any case, the "compute-log-return" function that encapsulated the debug print is a widely useful pattern. And it's especially useful when you're writing a program in an expressive language. Do not let the programming cruft conceal the actual idea of your code, use loggers that hide all the details.