It reminds me of the quote, "if I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter". Terse code is often better, because it is often developed using a process that only adds necessary things or was created by trial and error during the development process that isn't included in the final output.

Lengthy code is often written because a person coded their misunderstandings, their ambiguities about the problem space, and their early failures at solving the problem into the code.