When writing a mathematical proof, one goal is to continue compressing the proof. The proof gets more elegant but not necessarily more readable. Compression translates to better understanding, as you weed out unnecessary characters and verbosity.
I often hear developers say you should make your code foot print as small as possible. This can very quickly yield unreadable code. In mathematics, it isn’t such an issue since the exercise is purely academic. However, in production code where time is money, having people try to figure out what some very concise code is doing doesn’t seem to make much sense. For a little more verbose code, you get readability and savings.
At what point do you stop compressing software code?
I try to reach a level of verbosity where my program statements read like a sentence any programmer could understand. This does mean heavily refactoring my code such that it’s all short pieces of a story, so each action would be described in a separate method (an even further level might be to another class).
Meaning I would not reduce my number of characters just because it can be expressed in fewer. That’s what code-golf competitions are for.