[naasking]

> What does 'compactness' matter?

Because after the end of civilization, you may be inputting your first programs on punch cards or something similar, and your system's memory capacity might be measured in a few kilobytes, not gigabytes. Compactness is a huge deal in this context.

[erik_seaberg]

Having spent a couple of hours as a kid typing in a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedScript binary printed in a magazine, one byte at a time, I can confirm that compactness is valuable.