The starting assumption is highly dubious: "Short lines of code require less brainpower to read than long ones." I'm not going to nitpick the incredibly bullsh

The starting assumption is highly dubious: "Short lines of code require less brainpower to read than long ones." I'm not going to nitpick the incredibly bullshitty term "brainpower" and what is less and if that's actually advantageous, but if you write short lines of code, you're going to write more lines, which requires "more brainpower" to understand. You don't simply "chunk" lines in memory. If that were true, you could just as easily chunk function calls. That memory plays a role is fairly certain. There is a pretty hard finding from psycholinguistics: it's hard to understand nested structures. The sentence "the rat the cat the cook hit chased escaped" is much harder to understand than it's right-branching equivalent "the cook hit the cat that chased the rat that escaped". However, reading code is not the same as reading natural language. If you want to know if what you wrote is understandable, try reading your code without falling to back to remembering why you wrote it. Try to read what you wrote. Wait a few days if your recollections get in the way.