[the_af]

Think of lines of code as surgery to excise a tumor.

Of course you want to remove the tumor. Curing cancer is the goal. But each surgery is a liability; each scalpel cut you make may bring potentially fatal complications, so you strive to perform as few surgeries as possible while still saving the patient.

Rewarding LOCs is like rewarding the high number of surgeries a doctor had to perform on a patient in order to save him/her. It's backwards!