Code and prose isn't really comparable in this context, because in prose you are meant to read and process entire paragraphs at once, which is why it's importan

Code and prose isn't really comparable in this context, because in prose you are meant to read and process entire paragraphs at once, which is why it's important to be able to move from the end of one line to the beginning of the next fast, whereas with code you're meant to process it line by line. > Even before typewriters, consider the average newspaper: why do we call a regularly-occurring featured article in a newspaper a “column”? Because broadsheet papers were too wide to have only a single column; they would always be broken into multiple! Far more aggressive than 80 characters, columns in newspapers typically have 30 characters per line. Yes because a newspaper has a frontpage and a fold, and you want to have many headlines on the frontpage above the fold, all with a size matching their importance.