"number of characters per line" made sense when we all used text-based monitors with a fixed number of characters on the screen. Nowadays, most people are usin

"number of characters per line" made sense when we all used text-based monitors with a fixed number of characters on the screen. Nowadays, most people are using graphic displays, at a very high resolution, with beautiful, mathematically described fonts, which can be resized at will. So why are we restricting ourselves to an arbitrary number? 80 seems too low, no matter if you are writing javascript callbacks or writing Scheme code. Or doing python with a 4 space indentation. But it may be too much for older folks. I feel that the reason we have computers is to deal with this kind of stuff, so why can't we do whatever we want and have the computer display the way we like?