I've also seen (severe) examples of the converse - e.g. writing an 800 line monster which could better have been expressed as a regular expression (and a simple

I've also seen (severe) examples of the converse - e.g. writing an 800 line monster which could better have been expressed as a regular expression (and a simple one, at that). This leads me to think that conciseness is not necessarily as simple as we tend to think. Sure, overly concise code with clever hacks are often a nightmare to debug, but that's mostly because they are the wrong abstraction and not capturing the problem well enough.