The real issue (Craig barely touched it) is that some programmers are more interested in showing how "brilliant" they are (1 line a mile long) than writing good code. I have seen "if"'s with so many conditions that it was impossible to figure out a case in less than 1 hour. A short while ago I rewrote a problematic one line "if" to 18 lines and - lo and behold - the code shrank. Good code is short in binary, not in text.