A better metric than lines of code
ken: Both metrics seem to assume that source code is a fixed thing.  My bottleneck when working with source code is not write or read, but modify.  Therefore, the most important metric to me is whether an O(1) conceptual change requires only an O(1) change of source code.A small line count / compressed size / AST node count is probably a good indicator of this, but I'm not convinced it's exactly the same.