... used to impress non-programmers. Citing more lines of code is intended to imply that a program is more complex.
Let's look at some of the most common reasons a piece of code may have more or fewer lines though.
A recommended coding style nowadays is to put each curly bracket on a line by itself. A simple function written in this style containing, say, an if block with a nested for loop could contain at least six lines that are nothing but curly brackets. Your 10-line function is now written in 16 lines, but all of the characters that matter are exactly the same.
Ironically, the people who religiously follow and dictate this style of overusing line breaks are often the same ones who cry if you use "too much" whitespace to improve legibility. They claim the extra whitespace makes the program run slower. Bullshit. The language parser ignores whitespace. It may take a few more microseconds for the parser to "eat" the extra space characters, but once the code is parsed, it produces exactly the same list of machine instructions.
They're also the same asswipes who indent everything with four or more spaces, so that you have to scroll horizontally for miles to read each line. And then scroll all the way back to the left to read the beginning of the next line. Two spaces is plenty for legible indentation.
A related term is "one-liner," which is intended to impress other programmers with the supposed brevity and efficiency of the code. In practice, an entire program can be a one-liner by simply omitting line breaks.
So you can see that neither of these terms really says anything about the complexity and/or efficiency of the code.
Let's look at some of the most common reasons a piece of code may have more or fewer lines though.
A recommended coding style nowadays is to put each curly bracket on a line by itself. A simple function written in this style containing, say, an if block with a nested for loop could contain at least six lines that are nothing but curly brackets. Your 10-line function is now written in 16 lines, but all of the characters that matter are exactly the same.
Ironically, the people who religiously follow and dictate this style of overusing line breaks are often the same ones who cry if you use "too much" whitespace to improve legibility. They claim the extra whitespace makes the program run slower. Bullshit. The language parser ignores whitespace. It may take a few more microseconds for the parser to "eat" the extra space characters, but once the code is parsed, it produces exactly the same list of machine instructions.
They're also the same asswipes who indent everything with four or more spaces, so that you have to scroll horizontally for miles to read each line. And then scroll all the way back to the left to read the beginning of the next line. Two spaces is plenty for legible indentation.
A related term is "one-liner," which is intended to impress other programmers with the supposed brevity and efficiency of the code. In practice, an entire program can be a one-liner by simply omitting line breaks.
So you can see that neither of these terms really says anything about the complexity and/or efficiency of the code.
