E.W. Dijkstra: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight".
Personally, I think, much of the art of programming is to do as much as possible with as few lines of code as possible.
Agree, and even better solution some times: no code at all.
There’s more to it than that though. The solution using the least possible lines is often inscrutable and brittle. The art is in finding the right level of abstraction which can deliver the performance required while being sufficiently legible. Depending on the specific problem you have to weight your solution accordingly, if performance is critical you must often forfeit legibility. The art is in recognising and dealing with trade offs.
That’s Bill Gates’, not Dijkstra’s.