5 ms·

Yup! Python folks don’t seem to think it’s funny when I call the PEP-8 standard, with its 80-column line limit, “punchcard compliant,” though.

tyingq 7y ago
I'm one of those that sticks with 80x25 because I had decades of it influence me. I do understand, though, that it's dumb, and wouldn't force it on others.
- yoloClin 7y ago
  When I started conforming to it, my code became a lot more concise. I'd advocate every developer conforms to PEP-8 rules (80-char, nesting limits, etc), at least for a 3-12 month period. They'll be a better developer for it.
  - rlayton2 7y ago
    That's a great idea. Have an opinion about the standard from experience, not gut feel.
- gooseyard 7y ago
  I stick with it because I read the newspaper and eventually discovered that the wider a column is, the harder it is to read. I understand that it's not quite the same with code, and I don't know that there's any significant difference between 79 and 81 columns, but I never found anything that I couldn't get to work with 80 with a few minutes thought, so why not.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Yep. Newspapers are laid out in columns because that's simply easier for people to read. Since you're into dead tree editions, here's a fun fact you may not know: The fibers in newsprint are aligned vertically so that you can easily tear out an article vertically along its column. Tearing horizontally cleanly is significantly more difficult. Source: Worked for two major newspaper companies.
    - emmelaich 7y ago
      Probably vertical for strength too. They need it to be pulled the rollers in the printing machine.
      - ggus 7y ago
        Paper in books is also aligned the same way, to resist better to humidity. Humidity enlarges the fibres, but doesn't get them longer. In a humid environment a book grows wider but not taller. If the paper is oriented the other way, the paper would grow taller and the spine of the book, which is stitched and glued, would force the paper to warp and became ondulated.
- pcmonk 7y ago
  It lets me have 3-4 columns of code on a standard laptop or 8 columns on a 4k monitor, which is a huge productivity win.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    Only about 2.5 for me (at my font size on a 1920×1080 screen), but it's a productivity win regardless, and it's a massive productivity sink when I have to work with code written without that constraint. An 80+ character line is also a code smell for me; if a statement is so complex that it pushes past the 80 character mark and it can't be split into smaller chunks on their own lines, then I know for sure that something needs refactored (whether it be the statement itself or the nested control structures around it).
    - pcmonk 7y ago
      Yeah, I actually keep my editor columns at about 65-70 with :set nowrap. I find this gives me appropriate pressure to write shorter lines, but if I go past the end I've got another 10 columns or so until I hit 80.
- emmelaich 7y ago
  It's not really dumb. It's good to have somewhat of a standard. If there's anything wrong with it, it's that it's too big! Ideally we might have settled on something like newspaper column widths for readability - which are way less than 80.
flukus 7y ago
Make your editor worry about long lines. In vim: set wrap set sbr=\ In Visual Studio: Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> All Lnaguages. Select word wrap and Show Visual Glyphs.
eesmith 7y ago
Don't forget this part of PEP 8: > For flowing long blocks of text with fewer structural restrictions (docstrings or comments), the line length should be limited to 72 characters. Older IBM machines could only read 72 columns of the 80 columns of data. The remaining 8 columns were used to store sorting information, eg, a line number so if the card deck was dropped it could be re-sorted using a mechanical sorter.
- solidsnack9000 7y ago
  There are actually deeper reasons for these limits. Text typically gets broken into multiple columns when it would be over about 70 characters long, because reading long lines is uncomfortable. Many people talk about the 80 column rule as reflecting some technical limitation due to the antiquated punch cards — but they could certainly have made wider punchcards if they wanted to.
  - eesmith 7y ago
    Those who refer to it as a technical limitation are almost certainly wrong. Remington-Rand released a 90-column punched cards, for example, two years after the famous 80-column IBM card. But IBM equipment dominated the market, and their cards became "standard." https://historyofpunchcards.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/rivalry-remington-rand-vs-ibm/ https://historyofpunchcards.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/rivalry... Eg, Univac used the 90-column format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#Powers/Remington_Rand_UNIVAC_90-column_punched_card_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#Powers/Remington_... FWIW, the recommendation of 72 characters seems much more a programming standard than a general readability standard. For example, quoting from https://www.viget.com/articles/the-line-length-misconception/ https://www.viget.com/articles/the-line-length-misconception... quoting from "Bringhurst's authoritative The Elements of Typographic Style". > Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely-regarded as a satisfactory length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size. The 66-character line (counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal
  - oblio 7y ago
    Code is - text wise - not as dense as prose. There's usually a lot more special characters and white space. I don't think rules for prose apply here.
jldugger 7y ago
Fortunately this is a commonly overridable setting in pep8 linters; I generally go with what django project established: 119. The complaints about the odd length really helps identify the engineers who shouldn't be making coding style decisions.
- eredengrin 7y ago
  Why is this an invalid complaint? Are they complaining because it's not 120, or because it's significantly larger than 80? 120 means that you can't comfortably split two files on the same monitor (on most monitors), which is a very valid complaint (and is often cited by style guides for various languages as a reason to not exceed 80 chars). If they're complaining that it's 119 instead of 120, then maybe I can see a little bit what you're getting at.
  - jldugger 7y ago
    > If they're complaining that it's 119 instead of 120, then maybe I can see a little bit what you're getting at. This is indeed the complaint. Apologies it wasn't clearer.
eredengrin 7y ago
Except that pep8 doesn't call for 80-column limit?[1] Or am I missing something? It seems pretty clearly to request 79 to me. This is actually one of my pet peeves about pep8, why can't it just be 80 like everyone else? [1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#maximum-line-length https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#maximum-line-lengt...
- shthed 7y ago
  "Because an 80 char wide Emacs window starts wrapping at 79." https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/1h2eug/pep_8_why_is_the_character_limit_79_and_not_80/ https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/1h2eug/pep_8_w...
  - shrimp_emoji 7y ago
    Ugh.
  - eredengrin 7y ago
    Neat, another weapon to use against emacs in the vim vs emacs war.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Because with a diff annotation, it grows to 80.
  - eredengrin 7y ago
    huh, that's actually the first time I've heard a somewhat reasonable answer for that question. I wonder why pep8 gives such a terrible reason (editors that show newline chars) when there's actually a somewhat defensible reason. I still disagree with it, and other guides don't appear to consider this a problem even for projects like the linux kernel, which considers terminal users to be first class citizens, but it's at least nice to know a better reasoning than showing newline chars.

tyingq 7y ago

I'm one of those that sticks with 80x25 because I had decades of it influence me. I do understand, though, that it's dumb, and wouldn't force it on others.

yoloClin 7y ago
When I started conforming to it, my code became a lot more concise. I'd advocate every developer conforms to PEP-8 rules (80-char, nesting limits, etc), at least for a 3-12 month period. They'll be a better developer for it.
- rlayton2 7y ago
  That's a great idea. Have an opinion about the standard from experience, not gut feel.
gooseyard 7y ago
I stick with it because I read the newspaper and eventually discovered that the wider a column is, the harder it is to read. I understand that it's not quite the same with code, and I don't know that there's any significant difference between 79 and 81 columns, but I never found anything that I couldn't get to work with 80 with a few minutes thought, so why not.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Yep. Newspapers are laid out in columns because that's simply easier for people to read. Since you're into dead tree editions, here's a fun fact you may not know: The fibers in newsprint are aligned vertically so that you can easily tear out an article vertically along its column. Tearing horizontally cleanly is significantly more difficult. Source: Worked for two major newspaper companies.
  - emmelaich 7y ago
    Probably vertical for strength too. They need it to be pulled the rollers in the printing machine.
    - ggus 7y ago
      Paper in books is also aligned the same way, to resist better to humidity. Humidity enlarges the fibres, but doesn't get them longer. In a humid environment a book grows wider but not taller. If the paper is oriented the other way, the paper would grow taller and the spine of the book, which is stitched and glued, would force the paper to warp and became ondulated.
pcmonk 7y ago
It lets me have 3-4 columns of code on a standard laptop or 8 columns on a 4k monitor, which is a huge productivity win.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  Only about 2.5 for me (at my font size on a 1920×1080 screen), but it's a productivity win regardless, and it's a massive productivity sink when I have to work with code written without that constraint. An 80+ character line is also a code smell for me; if a statement is so complex that it pushes past the 80 character mark and it can't be split into smaller chunks on their own lines, then I know for sure that something needs refactored (whether it be the statement itself or the nested control structures around it).
  - pcmonk 7y ago
    Yeah, I actually keep my editor columns at about 65-70 with :set nowrap. I find this gives me appropriate pressure to write shorter lines, but if I go past the end I've got another 10 columns or so until I hit 80.
emmelaich 7y ago
It's not really dumb. It's good to have somewhat of a standard. If there's anything wrong with it, it's that it's too big! Ideally we might have settled on something like newspaper column widths for readability - which are way less than 80.

flukus 7y ago

Make your editor worry about long lines. In vim: set wrap set sbr=\ In Visual Studio: Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> All Lnaguages. Select word wrap and Show Visual Glyphs.

eesmith 7y ago

Don't forget this part of PEP 8: > For flowing long blocks of text with fewer structural restrictions (docstrings or comments), the line length should be limited to 72 characters. Older IBM machines could only read 72 columns of the 80 columns of data. The remaining 8 columns were used to store sorting information, eg, a line number so if the card deck was dropped it could be re-sorted using a mechanical sorter.

solidsnack9000 7y ago
There are actually deeper reasons for these limits. Text typically gets broken into multiple columns when it would be over about 70 characters long, because reading long lines is uncomfortable. Many people talk about the 80 column rule as reflecting some technical limitation due to the antiquated punch cards — but they could certainly have made wider punchcards if they wanted to.
- eesmith 7y ago
  Those who refer to it as a technical limitation are almost certainly wrong. Remington-Rand released a 90-column punched cards, for example, two years after the famous 80-column IBM card. But IBM equipment dominated the market, and their cards became "standard." https://historyofpunchcards.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/rivalry-remington-rand-vs-ibm/ https://historyofpunchcards.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/rivalry... Eg, Univac used the 90-column format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#Powers/Remington_Rand_UNIVAC_90-column_punched_card_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#Powers/Remington_... FWIW, the recommendation of 72 characters seems much more a programming standard than a general readability standard. For example, quoting from https://www.viget.com/articles/the-line-length-misconception/ https://www.viget.com/articles/the-line-length-misconception... quoting from "Bringhurst's authoritative The Elements of Typographic Style". > Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely-regarded as a satisfactory length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size. The 66-character line (counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal
- oblio 7y ago
  Code is - text wise - not as dense as prose. There's usually a lot more special characters and white space. I don't think rules for prose apply here.

jldugger 7y ago

Fortunately this is a commonly overridable setting in pep8 linters; I generally go with what django project established: 119. The complaints about the odd length really helps identify the engineers who shouldn't be making coding style decisions.

eredengrin 7y ago
Why is this an invalid complaint? Are they complaining because it's not 120, or because it's significantly larger than 80? 120 means that you can't comfortably split two files on the same monitor (on most monitors), which is a very valid complaint (and is often cited by style guides for various languages as a reason to not exceed 80 chars). If they're complaining that it's 119 instead of 120, then maybe I can see a little bit what you're getting at.
- jldugger 7y ago
  > If they're complaining that it's 119 instead of 120, then maybe I can see a little bit what you're getting at. This is indeed the complaint. Apologies it wasn't clearer.

eredengrin 7y ago

Except that pep8 doesn't call for 80-column limit?[1] Or am I missing something? It seems pretty clearly to request 79 to me. This is actually one of my pet peeves about pep8, why can't it just be 80 like everyone else? [1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#maximum-line-length https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#maximum-line-lengt...

shthed 7y ago
"Because an 80 char wide Emacs window starts wrapping at 79." https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/1h2eug/pep_8_why_is_the_character_limit_79_and_not_80/ https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/1h2eug/pep_8_w...
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  Ugh.
- eredengrin 7y ago
  Neat, another weapon to use against emacs in the vim vs emacs war.
ncmncm 7y ago
Because with a diff annotation, it grows to 80.
- eredengrin 7y ago
  huh, that's actually the first time I've heard a somewhat reasonable answer for that question. I wonder why pep8 gives such a terrible reason (editors that show newline chars) when there's actually a somewhat defensible reason. I still disagree with it, and other guides don't appear to consider this a problem even for projects like the linux kernel, which considers terminal users to be first class citizens, but it's at least nice to know a better reasoning than showing newline chars.