Brevity In Code

Yes, I'm going to try to convince you to write less code. But, this should be an easy feat; I have Shakespeare also advocating my cause:

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Shakespeare's truism is readily apparent in good code: code that expresses complex concepts in succinct statements is beautiful and worthy of admiration. For several reasons, all other things being equal, smaller code is better code.

Fewer lines of code mean less bugs and lower maintenance cost. There are, however, other less apparent reasons for which you should try to write as little as possible:

1. You won't fall pray to the temptation of writing code that's not immediately necessary. In other words, you'll be YAGNI compliant. :)
2. It is better to be thought a fool than to write code and remove all doubt. Joking aside, however, the more you write, the more likely you're to make a mistake.
3. You won't get locked into poor decisions. I was watching Abrams & Cwalina speak at PDC today. One of their comments really struck me: they said, and I'm paraphrasing, that refactoring and correcting design mistakes in frameworks is harder when you have more code than what's absolutely necessary. Specifically, they regretted adding a public constructor to the System.Exception base class. That's it! Just one public constructor too many! And although they wish they could change it, they simply can't. If you make a poor decision, you'll have to maintain it.
4. You're less likely to repeat yourself. Or, to phrase this positively, you'll be DRY compliant.
5. Finally, by writing less code, you'll avoid the temptation to over engineer your solutions.
   

Learning to be concise in code is hard; it takes effort and patience. You'll have to refactor ruthlessly and mercilessly, but it will be worth the effort. Even though you won't have much code to show off, you'll be proud of it.