> your code would look different than everyone else's machine. Not if you use an indentation-only style like my second example. One of the great things about t

> your code would look different than everyone else's machine. Not if you use an indentation-only style like my second example. One of the great things about that style is that it looks the same on anyone's machine, whatever kind of font you use. If you read some of my code, you'll never know that I wrote it in a proportional font. It looks the same if you view it in a monospaced font. > How would you display a guideline to make sure you were under a characters-per-line style? Most programmer's editors have more than one way to do that. There is usually a column number in the status line, and some editors can be configured to change the background color on any part of a line that exceeds your required line length. That works with any font, and it's visually less obtrusive than a red vertical line partway across your editor window. Also, an indentation-only style naturally leads to much shorter line lengths. If you compare my two examples above, the column-aligned version extends to column 77, while the indented version only goes to column 40! That's barely half the line length for the same code. In practice, I think a lot less about line length since I switched to the indentation-only style, since my lines of code tend to be so much shorter as a result. And I tend to write the simplest functions I can without excessive nesting, so it's pretty rare that I come close to any worries about line length. > What advantages are there? For a proportional font, I simply find it easier to read and nicer looking. And as I mentioned, it also helped teach me to use indentation instead of column alignment. I'm not saying you or anyone should necessarily convert the the Proportional Church, only that it is a worthwhile exercise to try it for a while.