I find that naming things descriptively and an 80 character limit are at odds. Agreed. 80 columns made a lot more sense in the FORTRAN days where variable name

I find that naming things descriptively and an 80 character limit are at odds. Agreed. 80 columns made a lot more sense in the FORTRAN days where variable names couldn't be more than 6 characters. Even in this article's example code, after doing the "right" thing of creating intermediate variables (debatable, as discussed in other comments), he still has to break the function call which harms rather than helps readability.