[hansvm]

Everything has tradeoffs, but there's value in reducing both line and character counts as well.

For example, nobody ever uses anything other than ijk for loop indices unless the index is particularly meaningful or they've written a deeply nested abomination. Why? It's not just laziness in typing; it gives more relative room for characters that matter. Longer names and patterns are acceptable if you can't make your point clearly enough with few characters, but length isn't the goal; communication is.

It's important to limit lines of code too (and their widths) because if an idea doesn't fit comfortably on your screen then you won't be able to leverage the pattern-recognition parts of your brain to figure out what's going on.

From a different perspective, you know that feeling you get when somebody dumps a 1000-line PR on you (or an excessively long HN comment...)? It's hard to digest because you can't grok the whole thing at once and have to switch to carefully analyzing each component just to even have the context to then give the thing a proper review. If that same PR could be wired together with a few high-level concepts (less code, but more involved baseline knowledge required to understand it), it would be instantly understandable to somebody with the same background.