Things are complicated, but it's a well-known fact that lines-of-code is literally the worst metric of source-code health. Lines-of-code have been previously used as a productivity metric and as an efficiency metric, but in the past several decades, LOC has been debunked as virtually worthless in both cases.

In other words, if you're thinking "that guy must be productive, he wrote twice as many lines as this other guy" or "this code must be slower since it's 3 times longer than that code" you're most likely wrong in both cases. Or, in the best case, very naive.

And what's up with Ars Technica just copy-pasting SO (or prog.SE) answers into an article?