I've often wondered about this. What, precisely, "turns off" someone about having shorthand notation for things?
There are a lot of things businesses and people in general look at when trying to figure out what language to program things in. One of the major concerns is whether or not code can be maintained. Part of this is readability. Readability can go down dramatically if you're trying to understand the code of someone who likes to use "slick tricks"
A good example of this is "magical" functions and variables, i.e. $_, @_, split, print, tr///, s///, //, etc.... Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to use the shorthand form (i.e. shift; instead of my $foo = shift (@_);) Other times it makes code confusing and errors hard to catch.
This is not to say that languages that support terseness are bad (it's mostly the way people use "contractions", as you called them). But because with some languages such terseness is not possible, obfusication becomes hard, and the readibility goes up. The silly thing about all of this is if coding standards were implemented so that readable code was created, languages where terseness was possible would be used more (IMHO). But that's some people for you -- instead of allowing coders bend and break the rules when it is good to do so, all rule bending/breaking is verboten. Go figure.
