My completely non-objective experiment of writing a simple CLI game in C++ and Haskell shows that the lines of code were indeed less in case of Haskell.. but the number of words were roughly the same, meaning the Haskell code just "wider" instead of "higher".

And then I didn't even make this "experiment" with Java or another managed, more imperative language which could have shed some weight due to not caring about manual memory management.

So not sure how much truth is in there - I think it differs based on the given program: some lend itself better for an imperative style, others prefer a more functional one.

My experience is that width is faster than height to type- mostly from lack of time spent indenting. This is _completely_ fixed by using a decent auto-formatter, but at least for me the bias towards width lingers on, because it took me years to notice that I needed an auto-formatter