> 1. The longer more explicit code might end up shorter and more performant after it is compiled (like in the oldskool performance increasing trick of unrolling loops)
Or it might be less performant. If you actually care about this, you should have an automated test running regularly that will tell you one way or the other. But most of the time it's not worth worrying about such things.
> 2.When you come back to your fancy code later you may have forgotten about that particular fancy trick and now you dont understand your code.
> 3. Other people are less likely to understand your code.
Or using fancy tricks more frequently can help you remember them. I think you should use every feature available in the language - developers need to be able to understand the language so that they can read third-party library code. Or else have an automated system that flags usage of particular features.
> 4. By using more specialised features in a langauge your code is now less transportable to other langauges.
Who cares? Seriously, how likely is this to actually come up? If you've chosen language X you presumably had a good reason for doing so; you should write language X, not try and write language Y in language X.
Fewest lines of code is not the perfect metric, but I think it hits the sweet spot: it's very simple to calculate, and captures a good proportion of the difference between good code and bad code.
Or it might be less performant. If you actually care about this, you should have an automated test running regularly that will tell you one way or the other. But most of the time it's not worth worrying about such things.
> 2.When you come back to your fancy code later you may have forgotten about that particular fancy trick and now you dont understand your code. > 3. Other people are less likely to understand your code.
Or using fancy tricks more frequently can help you remember them. I think you should use every feature available in the language - developers need to be able to understand the language so that they can read third-party library code. Or else have an automated system that flags usage of particular features.
> 4. By using more specialised features in a langauge your code is now less transportable to other langauges.
Who cares? Seriously, how likely is this to actually come up? If you've chosen language X you presumably had a good reason for doing so; you should write language X, not try and write language Y in language X.
Fewest lines of code is not the perfect metric, but I think it hits the sweet spot: it's very simple to calculate, and captures a good proportion of the difference between good code and bad code.