He didn't specifically explain that golf in the extreme way we golf here is good, but rather that ``The fewer characters you type, the fewer characters you can get wrong.'' He claims that there's a linear correlation between the number of characters in a system's source code and how many bugs it has.

Seems like not only history is repeating ...

There are better references available for this fact ... see Re: Re: The qq{worse is better} approach (discussion) - Length of Code vs. Errors in Code.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com