Science. 88 produced smaller files than 80. And 90 and above didn’t noticeably shorten files. Like Raymond Hettinger said in his talk beyond pep8, 90ish is bet

Science. 88 produced smaller files than 80. And 90 and above didn’t noticeably shorten files. Like Raymond Hettinger said in his talk beyond pep8, 90ish is better than a strict 80. If you have 81 characters on a line its a waste of time to move that to three lines and now harder to read. So there should be some buffer. that buffer is 10%. The goal is 80 but we are ok with up to 88.