That's a brilliant perspective - I love it!
I hadn't thought of it in quite those terms, but I have one project where I'm constantly trying to keep the code footprint round about the 12k mark, and I've come of think of that as "bonsai programming" - patiently and meticulously trimming and shaping to avoid sprawl and bloat!
Thanks for the phrase "Bonsai Programming". It explains perfectly why after many decades of dev work I still spend time on one particular codebase I started working on in 2005 purely for my own use.
I've done iterations/rewrites of it, in order, with C#, Ruby, Python, Go, Free Pascal, and have been back with C# for the last few variants. Each time the code gets smaller, faster, neater, clearer, more powerful, and better documented.
It will probably never be seen by anyone else (I use it for my own stuff), but I get the same satisfaction after almost two decades of working on it that a gardener might get when pruning and tidying a long-lived and long-loved bush or tree.
I'm 7 years into my own bonsai software project. As I learn more about CS and SWE I get to slowly introduce new concepts into the code to improve it. "Each time the code gets smaller, faster, neater, clearer, more powerful, and better documented" is such a wonderful feeling.
I really like the idea of bonsai languages, too. Rather than growing across various dimensions as new features are demanded, they stay small, concise, and focused just getting tighter, neater, and more performant. Of course, this isn't always practical nor desirable. I'm not sure if there are many bonsai languages, though. Perhaps something like awk?
