I see both points but regarding (2), there are common cases where you are not necessarily doing anything wrong but the 80 character limit will make your code le

I see both points but regarding (2), there are common cases where you are not necessarily doing anything wrong but the 80 character limit will make your code less readable, especially when using four spaces or more for indentation. For example you might end up in the fourth level of indentation wanting to write a list comprehension that would be perfectly readable in one line but have to break it down because of this rather short hard limit. I think having a soft and a hard limit makes more sense, if anything, I would make 80 characters the soft limit and perhaps 100 a hard limit, although I'd prefer them to be 100 and 120.