Do the 'best' programmers use fewest lines of code?

The best programmers write the appropriate number of lines of code. No more, no less.

Who decides what the appropriate number of code lines is?

@DivByZero the programmer, depending on the best algo he thinks would be best for the situation. I meant to say that many times people think few lines = better optimization which is wrong.

I tend to think each line of code I write is a potential source of error.

So to minimize risk, I minimize the amount of code. I hope this generally leads to better quality code.

Better quality being: not having to wake up at 3 am to deal with dodgy logic.

With certain languages, you COULD write the whole program on one line. If you know, you were a crazy person.

I thought LOC for measuring code quality passed from this world. It tells nothing really.. If you add tests the code is better, if you remove redundant logic the code is also better => LOC have no direct effect on code quality

Nope, they write in binary

@DivByZero I do

Less lines of code = higher logic density => harder to debug => ends up on stack overflow only to be marked as already answered in a totally unrelated question about jQuery

I see, someone over at quora :D

@vortexman100 yup. Liked it so much I had to share it.