From the very article you referenced: "One should take care not to overestimate the impact of language on defects. While the observed relationships are statistically significant, the effects are quite small. Analysis of deviance reveals that language accounts for less than 1% of the total explained deviance." That's a tiny effect size.
Moreover, Clojure is fairly compact, but isn't really a "terse" language. Consider APL and J as examples of truly terse languages. Programs written in them are generally horrible to read and maintain (at least for an average programmer who didn't write the original code!). So there might be some relationship between verbosity and quality, but the relationship is far more complex than "verbosity -> more code -> more bugs." Otherwise we'd all be building our mission-critical software in APL.
Plus, there are numerous well-known cases of bugs caused because a language provides a terse syntax, where redundant syntax would have prevented the problem. E.g., unintentional assignment in conditional expressions ("=" vs. "=="), and the "if (condition) ; ..." error in C-like languages. I've personally made similar errors in Lisp languages which are about as terse as Clojure, e.g., writing "(if some-cond (do-this) (and-that))" instead of "(if some-cond (progn (do-this) (and-that)))".
Redundancy in a programming language is often a safety rail: it shouldn't be casually discarded in the name of brevity for its own sake.
Moreover, Clojure is fairly compact, but isn't really a "terse" language. Consider APL and J as examples of truly terse languages. Programs written in them are generally horrible to read and maintain (at least for an average programmer who didn't write the original code!). So there might be some relationship between verbosity and quality, but the relationship is far more complex than "verbosity -> more code -> more bugs." Otherwise we'd all be building our mission-critical software in APL.
Plus, there are numerous well-known cases of bugs caused because a language provides a terse syntax, where redundant syntax would have prevented the problem. E.g., unintentional assignment in conditional expressions ("=" vs. "=="), and the "if (condition) ; ..." error in C-like languages. I've personally made similar errors in Lisp languages which are about as terse as Clojure, e.g., writing "(if some-cond (do-this) (and-that))" instead of "(if some-cond (progn (do-this) (and-that)))".
Redundancy in a programming language is often a safety rail: it shouldn't be casually discarded in the name of brevity for its own sake.