COBOL generated a lot of billable hours. I did early years in my career as a consultant-for-hire in a SF body shop, and occasionally would have to fix some COBOL thing. I sure hated it. Woke up one day in a puddle of drool from passing out because of boredom, and then switched jobs.
Beads is from a word-count metric, is probably within 20% of the minimum word count for the sample programs i presented, if you exclude techniques that greatly obfuscate the logic such as those used in Oscar Toledo's famous chess program.
Substitution and concatenative languages like FORTH regularly win code-length contests, but they aren't very readable. Beads tries to find a happy medium between brevity and clarity. I think people writing it will enjoy the careful balance that was struck.
These two statements are in no way equivalent.
I see what GP was complaining about. Even your opening para graph contains a fair bit of confusion. It reads like you are suggesting imperative languages were succeeded by object oriented, which were succeeded by functional in 'generations' - which is already incorrect on a couple of fundamental levels - and now the time is "ripe" for a "new paradigm" called declarative. Which is a language classification that has been around since nearly the beginning (first thing it makes me think of is Prolog, e.g. 1970s). So is this new or old?
This followed by a couple of pretty silly sounding assertions "almost no bugs" "10:1 reduction in life-cycle costs" which unsurprisingly are not supported.
Then we have the last sentence "For many graphical interactive or client/server applications, you can replace the entire development stack with one relatively simple tool.". Isn't that what you really want to convey?
When you get off on the wrong foot like that it's not hard to see why you've had some of the responses you have had. If you replaced the entire first paragraph with that last sentence you'd be far better off; the rest is poor communication, just getting in your own way.