[roenxi]

I'm going to throw out a plug for that mindset going beyond tutorials.

It is a suspect proposition that anything is gained by turning 3 lines of code into one line of code. Unless it is javascript for the Google homepage or somesuch where the bytes matter. Moving code from a bad data model to a good one usually correlates with a big reduction in line count, but the gain is in choosing more appropriate data structures and not in the number of lines removed.

Every reader of code, including the author after 3 months, is going to have to read and understand the code from scratch. One line doing a multidimensional transform of the data is going to scan for a small fraction of people. That one liner would take about 3 times as long to understand as any one line of the tutorial code. The data model hasn't changed either. If anything, I'd argue that the nature of the transform being done is clearer in 3 lines.

[golergka]

Readability of the code is always relative to the reader. In any language that I've mastered, I've always preferred more verbose options at first, but with experience I found out that I find condensed versions to be more elegant and time-saving.

In the end, choose code style that matches level of your audience. If you write a one-off python script that automizes some build process in mostly non-python codebase, it should probably be very verbose and easy to understand. If, on the other hand, you're writing code in a decently advanced codebase and most of your colleagues are fluent in the language (or at least, supposed to be), it makes sense to use as much condensed syntax sugar as possible.

[barrystaes]

I agree, gains should go to reading the code most of the time. But when you say

> It is a suspect proposition that anything is gained by turning 3 lines of code into one line of code.

Some code is way more verbose than its description would be. A named function signals intent:

  function multidimensional_transform(the_data)

And for Javascript ES2015 there is new syntax (like spread operators) that improves code the same way.