3 ms·

Agreed, 80-chars may be an accident of history, but it's an accident which happens to line up quite well with the human eyes ability to track horizontal lines o

by s_kilk 10y ago

Agreed, 80-chars may be an accident of history, but it's an accident which happens to line up quite well with the human eyes ability to track horizontal lines of text. It gets tiring listening to devs rage about the 80-char limit, then go on to produce code that's basically unreadable because it scrolls way off the screen.

arethuza 10y ago
I was looking at some C code of mine that is ~30 years old - it was written on 80x24 serial terminal in vi and I was fairly pleased with how readable my code was. I suspect a large part of that was the short line lengths!
jahewson 10y ago
> it's an accident which happens to line up quite well with the human eyes ability to track horizontal lines of text. Citation needed.
- fao_ 10y ago
  From observation, people on HN tend to discourage small replies that say nothing (such as this). It is likely that you would not have got downvoted if you had said what evidence you have to the contrary, given your opinion on it and why you think that, or even made an effort to debunk or state why you think a few common arguments for the line length being 80 chars are incorrect. Hacker News keeps clean discourse by downvoting comments that are not relevant or do not stimulate debate.
int_19h 10y ago
It goes both ways. If you break in the middle of the line just because you need to follow the standard, you may end up breaking in the middle of a construct that is really meant to be read as a whole; and having to move your focus to from the end of one line to the beginning of another is quite disruptive to the flow. I'm also not convinced that 80 chars "happens to line up quite well with the human eyes ability to track horizontal lines of text". It's claimed often, but in the absence of any actual studies, the best you can really say on this is that it is your subjective experience. Mine is different - I find 100-120 columns per line to be eminently more readable. Until the aforementioned study determines what the average peak readability length of _code_ (which I think is likely to be different from regular text, because the semantic units are different between the two), we'll just have to agree to disagree.

by s_kilk 10y ago

arethuza 10y ago

I was looking at some C code of mine that is ~30 years old - it was written on 80x24 serial terminal in vi and I was fairly pleased with how readable my code was. I suspect a large part of that was the short line lengths!

jahewson 10y ago

> it's an accident which happens to line up quite well with the human eyes ability to track horizontal lines of text. Citation needed.

fao_ 10y ago
From observation, people on HN tend to discourage small replies that say nothing (such as this). It is likely that you would not have got downvoted if you had said what evidence you have to the contrary, given your opinion on it and why you think that, or even made an effort to debunk or state why you think a few common arguments for the line length being 80 chars are incorrect. Hacker News keeps clean discourse by downvoting comments that are not relevant or do not stimulate debate.

int_19h 10y ago

It goes both ways. If you break in the middle of the line just because you need to follow the standard, you may end up breaking in the middle of a construct that is really meant to be read as a whole; and having to move your focus to from the end of one line to the beginning of another is quite disruptive to the flow. I'm also not convinced that 80 chars "happens to line up quite well with the human eyes ability to track horizontal lines of text". It's claimed often, but in the absence of any actual studies, the best you can really say on this is that it is your subjective experience. Mine is different - I find 100-120 columns per line to be eminently more readable. Until the aforementioned study determines what the average peak readability length of _code_ (which I think is likely to be different from regular text, because the semantic units are different between the two), we'll just have to agree to disagree.