Writing 50k lines of code takes a lot of time, and every line has a chance of spawning a bug or undesired behaviour. Of course it's not a perfect metric of a sy

Writing 50k lines of code takes a lot of time, and every line has a chance of spawning a bug or undesired behaviour. Of course it's not a perfect metric of a system, and of course a line of code written by some experienced C guru will be completely different from one written by a newcomer to the language. But it is also true that the less lines of code, the less potential points of failure in a program. Also, if you were given the task to read and analyze a piece of code, you'd surely wish it were shorter! As long as the software performs the desired tasks and readability is cared for, shorter tend to be better.