Number of lines is used as a proxy for complexity, especially among those who are less familiar with how the programming sausage is made (management, non-IT fol

Number of lines is used as a proxy for complexity, especially among those who are less familiar with how the programming sausage is made (management, non-IT folks, etc.). To non-technical folks, it sounds pretty impressive that you can do a simple change (low # of lines) and get a huge improvement. Nevermind the fact that behind those couple of lines could be days of code analysis and several rewrites. It's the allure of the easy, "why didn't I think of that" kind of thing.