Haskell magician Don Stewart echoes my own opinion on lines of code in his Haskell Workshop demo on xmonad:

A couple of nice refactorings happened when we found data structures that fit better, and you dramatically drop down in the number of lines of code. So we use lines of code as a bit of a heuristic for working out when code sucks. If something gets really big, it probably needs to be rewritten.

I’m staring at a 60,000 line code base right now that I’m positive could be under 30,000 lines of code if it had a good rewri… erm, refactoring. Sometimes when you can’t figure out what’s going on in a function that’s a thousand lines long, the best solution is to rewrite the thing in a hundred lines instead. (And that time, I really did mean rewrite, not refactor.)

Update: Steve Yegge writes a good essay about code size, and believes that “the worst thing that can happen to a code base is size”. (If only he applied that principle to his blog posts as well…)