But as a pedagogical device, it would seem to be teaching students to focus on the wrong thing (and it also fails Montrose's token-count definition of shorter.)

But as a pedagogical device, it would seem to be teaching students to focus on the wrong thing (and it also fails Montrose's token-count definition of shorter.) (Caveat: the site is still down.) More generally, I think there is an inversion of causality here: well-written code is often shorter than slapdash code with the same goal because the author thought about the problem as a whole, got straight to the point, and avoided adding complexity. I think that is clear in the Sudoku-solver example of my previous post.