[JoeAltmaier]

The threshold for 'darling' depends upon the facility of the developer. Some of these are obvious to those with extensive experience.

So where does it end? Dumbing down code until its so wordy, so bland, that it takes minutes to digest every phrase? To rewrite it in your minds eye until its back to that 'darling' concise expression. I recall taking a contractors 2 pages of code, and reducing it to a line. Not even a very complex line. In my view that was all improvement.

[C0d3r]

It's about clarity, if you reduced all those lines to a single understandable line of code, that's great, if you obscured logic by using a one-liner, I'll say it was not an improvement, but it is indeed a thin line