80 char limits used to be very common in school and business, I’m old enough that most of my professors preferred it, and most students actually did too. My fir

80 char limits used to be very common in school and business, I’m old enough that most of my professors preferred it, and most students actually did too. My first programming jobs required it as well. There were a few students who felt limited, or had fun intentionally acting flippant or incredulous about these limits when their screens were more than 80 chars wide. The rule is slightly anachronistic now, and originally came from the time when CRT terminals (and printers) were 80 columns of text, and there was no graphical window manager. The rule was primarily about making code comfortable to read for everyone involved, to meet the minimum display with of anyone in the group. If you have a wide display but I don’t then it sucks for me. Plus I’m pretty sure that when I first started programming, a lot of printers and text editors and a lot of software wasn’t very good at handling long lines and characters would get mugged or discarded. Almost everything today will just wrap and display reasonably, but that wasn’t always the case back in the days of ed/edlin and earlier. These days I hardly ever hear about width limits anymore, though it does come up every once in a while when people have to work a lot in terminal or ssh sessions. I do have to drop into Linux non-graphical mode all the time, and even edits files and build code sometimes, and code that’s wider than the display is less fun to wade through. People still like having a reasonable limit, like we’d definitely get complaints if we start writing code that’s 500 characters on a line, right? :P