What a strange attitude! There's plenty of zero-cost bits available to allow for articles of all sorts of lengths. For example, the "Foundations and Trends" journals (e.g. Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning, or Foundations and Trends in Optimization) publish articles that are usually at least 100 pages long. These articles tend to be well-respected and highly cited.
Longer articles have many advantages in allowing for a more in-depth explanation, and it is certainly not the case that every reader wants papers shoe-horned into an artificial page limit.
> There's plenty of zero-cost bits available to allow for articles of all sorts of lengths.
Straw man - i wasn't talking about cost, hard drive space, or any relation near what you're referring to.
> ...articles that are usually at least 100 pages long. These articles tend to be well-respected and highly cited.
Another straw man - why does length (short or long) correlate with quality again?
> Longer articles have many advantages in allowing for a more in-depth explanation
Ah the real comment. Ok. I definitely agree - longer usually means more space to explain.
> and it is certainly not the case that every reader wants papers shoe-horned into an artificial page limit.
So be it. There's usually an appendix or supplementary materials that can offer expanded derivations. Often the authors trim a lot of the fat for the published paper and put a longer version in a book/thesis.
> What a strange attitude!
As a writer of publications i want more space and agree, but as a reader of publications (way more than i write) there's just too much out there to spend my time going through 50+ pages. I can put in the time for 10-20 pages and if i still want more i'll check out other publications, appendix, supplementary, thesis...whatever. It's an important and necessary skill for academics to be able to concisely present their work - not just for publications, but for grant applications, presentations, etc.
If you don't like to read long articles, don't read them. I like to read them; they tend to be much easier to understand than artificially shortened articles. It seems to me that complaining that somebody wrote a long article because they take too long for you to read is exactly analogous to saying that since you only like to read short stories, nobody should write a long novel because it would take too much time for you to read.
Academic writing is dense. When you shorten the page limit, you force authors to make it denser, to explain less and rely more on the readers' previous knowledge. As a writer, I'm often surprised how easy it is fill pages and pages, and as a reader, I'd rather read clear expository prose than wizardly hand-waving.
Longer articles have many advantages in allowing for a more in-depth explanation, and it is certainly not the case that every reader wants papers shoe-horned into an artificial page limit.