If code was a house and you remove an internal wall and it appears to be fine, don’t be surprised when cracks appear in a year.
Show me any coder who hasn’t looked a bunch of old code and thought ‘Thats not needed… Ill remove it’, then found out a week later why the code actually was essential.
I don’t want to get into an extended argument here, because if you believe that less lines of code is better quality, I won’t be able to convince you otherwise.
But its far too general a statement to be true.
And the thought that less source code makes for a smaller compiled app is not necessarily a true statement either… in the “old days” it was more so… but today you can refactor many lines, and the app remains a similar size… and may or may not be of better “quality”
In the end what counts is that the app works. Executable size is mostly irrelevant, when a huge part of it is libraries. I have not created a Hello world in ages, but I would not be surprised if it was megs or something like that. It would take pretty massive changes in source to affect significantly such result.
That said, coding style is all a matter of personal preference. Some will tell you that systematically decomposing stuff in different lines is more legible. Others like me like compacity. In littrature, Marcel Proust is highly regarded, but I could never stomach his full page phrase, and his “A la recherche du temps perdu” fell from my hands a long time ago for his verbose and redundant writing.
More is certainly not better. Even if, as a marketing ploy, one can say “300,000 lines of code”, or, as Microsoft once said, “century-man-hours of development” !