I have noticed every page I scroll causes a comprehensive loss of around 90%, so in reading something that is 10 pagefuls long, I might only be able to produce a tiny part of the program.
Your milage may vary.
I find not scrolling, and just moving my eyes, I rapidly absorb the program, and I find most bugs just by reading the code. This practice is absolutely impossible for me if I have to scroll very far and made difficult by scrolling at all.
It is for this reason that I find simply counting the actual words to be an excellent estimate of complexity.
By the way: There are several temporary variables in that code; c:: creates a view called "c" which automatically updates whenever the dependent variables on the right side change.
After digging around for a while, I discovered there was no bug. The partner's client code had the auth disabled, and the pervious server was misconfigured to not require auth. All which would not have been a problem if the system just did an "if headers.auth != "Basic ..." - but buried in this forest of stuff, it was overlooked.
It seems that some developers just love their edifices. They build all this "infrastructure", expanding code by an order of magnitude or more. It's considered good and robust and so, so much writing online is dedicated to this pursuit. I think it gives those programmers a feeling of import, as if they're really architecting something, not just pushing a few form fields around.
Even on the line by line basis, it's shocking how they love verbosity. Type inference? Nope, that makes things too compact and hard to read. Higher order functions to wrap up common patterns? Too difficult to understand. I'm not sure if developers simply lack the tiny bit of extra intelligence, or if they've tried it and honestly concluded that overflowing verbosity is the key to readability. Either way, it's sad, and holding back progress slightly.
Why do you think that is?
Is there evidence one way or the other on whether it's better to measure size with, say, number of lines, number of tokens, or number of nodes in a parse tree? or something else?
And token counts don't help as code that insists that each brace must be on its own line detracts from readability. For one thing it pushes the last bit of the function off the bottom of the screen meaning you have to scroll.
A line that is overly complex is eventually get rewritten.
I say this as someone who has written large bodies of code in sigma 5 assembly, Fortran II and IV bliss 36, C, C++, and Lisp. Perhaps more to the point, these days I read large bodies of code measured in millions. Lines of code dictates how long it will take to understand it.
Peter Norvig in paip gives some examples of small code and how it can be exceedingly clear.
