This question came to me as I play a programming game called EXAPUNKS. The game offers no code solution to any of its challenges but as long as you manage to complete your programming mission, you are set. After you have written the code, run tests which it passed (your code has to satisfy 100 different case scenarios iterating on the same problem), a histogram will show up and you can see how many cycles your code took and the shortest code gets you the highest ranking.

EXAPUNKS teaches me that shorter code = better code but is that always true?

What do you think? Is shorter code, better code?