Before everyone rushes out to defend golfing (too late), consider this...

When I golf, and I am guessing this is pretty typical, I basically slap some line noise together, and see what happens when it runs. I might edit and execute my program hundreds of times, but this is no biggee...I have a syntax highligting editor that catches typos, a shell with command line history, a windowing OS, browser open to hyperlinked man pages, and my own box with cycles to burn. If I get too clever and screw something up, I spend 99% of my time debugging, and almost none wrestling with the environment.

Now consider the programming environment of 1972. Punch cards, line editors, batched jobs on shared mainframes, byzantine manuals on dead trees...editting, compiling, executing code, and reading docs was a pain in the ass. It could literally take hours to learn your program had a fatal one character typo.

Given all this, I think I would stay aware from "clever" progamming languages, too. At least for a little while...:)