You're glancing over the fact that mathematics uses only one token per variable `x = ...`, whereas software engineering best practices demand an excessive number of tokens per variable for clarity.

It's also a pretty silly thing to say difficulty = tokens. We all know line counts don't tell you much, and it shows in their own example.

Even if you did have Math-like tokenisation, refactoring a thousand lines of "X=..." to "Y=..." isnt a difficult problem even though it would be at least a thousand tokens. And if you could come up with E=mc^2 in a thousand tokens, does not make the two tasks remotely comparable difficulty.