Just from my own experience, I’d say yes, with qualification—rather like age is only an approximate indicator of maturity, line count isn’t a meaningful metric

Just from my own experience, I’d say yes, with qualification—rather like age is only an approximate indicator of maturity, line count isn’t a meaningful metric per se, but a proxy for more important, less tangible things like complexity, navigability, fitting the program in mind, and so on. In Haskell, for example, I can write software that does more things, using less code, with higher confidence that it’s correct, and much higher ability to change it, than I ever could in C++, my previous top language. That’s partly the language, partly the fact that it matches my style of thinking, and partly the culture around it—writing reusable code, heavily encapsulating state, and making as much of your program as possible “correct by construction” so that invalid states and state transitions are inexpressible—or at least harder to express, such that the easy path is also the right one. A 500-line Haskell module tends to feel very large to me, on par with 1–2000 lines or so of C++. I don’t necessarily mean to just evangelise Haskell or functional programming here. Any language & ecosystem with an expressive orthogonal core, which matches your problem space and not only matches but improves your style of thinking, can give you similar benefits if you’re deliberate about taking advantage of it.