And the four lines look pretty simplistic and dumb. We certainly wouldn't want to do that. OK, now what about our elegant solution, which I am sure you have all worked out. We don't even bother testing. We take the integer value of 3, subtract whatever the contents at I are, and put the result right back into I. Neat.
Programmers love to do that sort of stuff.
Unfortunately, while elegance may be a halo, the world actually runs on practicality. Our elegant solution is the stuff that bugs are made from. While it would work perfectly in Version 1.0, down the line there will be problems. There will be new features, new hardware, and new versions. The original programmers will be long gone.