“the less, the better” Could mean: 1) As you said, terse clever code and agree 100%. 2) Or avoid writing factories that produce factories, abstractions upon

“the less, the better” Could mean: 1) As you said, terse clever code and agree 100%. 2) Or avoid writing factories that produce factories, abstractions upon abstractions that never get the payoff since the abstraction only gets used for a single (or a handful) of cases ever. When you write abstractions, make sure that in next 10-20 years its going to get its money's worth by taking advantage of it. There are always some exceptions but most of the time I've seen code that has no defense for all the bloat. 3) The best code is the code that you don't write. In this case "the less, the better" indeed. So I can see multiple meanings of "less, the better". Also, my experience matches the author - new developers are mostly proud of number of lines than cleverness.