I'm an original author of the code and I made it out of curiosity, not for other reasons. I also prefer readable (and concise) code in general, but shortening the code is a very different matter -- it is a sport (sometimes called code golfing) and not necessarily connected to good programming skills. And note that I have spent (and had to spend) only 24 hours to do it: code golfing is very time-consuming and 24 hours are often short for this standard. ;)
For the Brainfuck interpreter, I was also motivated by this StackOverflow question:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1053931/code-golf-shortes...
In this sense it does have a practical implication to gauge the minimal possible Turing-complete language implementation.