A lot of programmers seem to think that (the more code they can jam on the screen at a time the better, and thus any unnecessary newlines are superfluous), but I also don't understand why many are so rabid about it.

We generally don't code on 80x25 character terminals anymore, super high res monitors are cheap, vertical lines in code aren't a scarce commodity.

Personally I tend to like a fair amount of vertical whitespace (either in pure whitespace form or comments) in my code to split things up logically, even within the same function and when the newlines aren't required, eg:

  x = 10
  y = 20
  z = 0

  speed = 80

Variables assignments/func calls, etc that are closely coupled kept together, but some whitespace as things become less directly linked. I'd rather be able to quickly scan code in 10-40 line chunks than fit more code on the screen at once.