I love people who can leave a program functionally better with fewer lines of clear code. That last bit is important, obfuscated code is clever, but not useful.
Recently I've been learning that from two angles. First I'm realizing that being a bit more verbose is often clear and safer. Second, I've been reading and learning a lot about compilers, and I'm realizing that my "efficient" (short) code and other trickery does diddly-squat, and the compiler will produce the same code either way.
