After coming across the code golf trivia around the site it is obvious people try to find ways to write code and algorithms as short as the possibly can in terms of characters,
I hope this does not become a flame war. Good code has many attributes, including:
The brevity of code is not that important in 21st century programming. It used to be more important when memory was really scarce. Please see this question, including my answer, for books referencing the attributes above.