8 ms·

Any particular fixed width is inherently stupid in some way. 78? 80? 132? 255? All crap. Still, having some fixed width is inherently useful. Encourages rea

by RhysU 13y ago

Any particular fixed width is inherently stupid in some way. 78? 80? 132? 255? All crap. Still, having some fixed width is inherently useful. Encourages readability. Permits stodgy old guys like me to print and annotate code for reviews/debugging. And it encourages making people think when going from column N to column N+1 that maybe there's a better way to restructure the logic to make it more expressive. That said, 80's been with us for awhile. Your question is like asking if it would make sense to increase automobile widths. We inherited those. And, from a more recent generation, we inherited 80 columns. Stick with it.

cmccabe 13y ago
Telling people to use 80 columns because "we inherited it" is just cargo-culting. Intelligent people will rebel against that. Instead, tell people the actual reasons why we use 80 columns. It is because your eyes have to physically move as you read a line of text. Forcing them to move too far causes excessive eyestrain. Additionally, when lines are excessively long, you lose your place in the document by the time you get to the end of the line. These are the same reasons why newspapers have multiple columns, even though it would be easy for them to put everything into a single giant column. Shorter columns are more readable. In a way, the question is akin to asking why we still have minimum font sizes even on "retina" displays. You can buy a monitor that can display teeny teeny fonts, but you can't buy eyeballs or a brain that can make sense of them. Similarly, you can easily have giant lines of code on any monitor from the last 20 years. But good luck reading them. There are some additional issues which are specific to computer code. One is that extremely long lines often come from excessive nesting, an antipattern.

8 ms·

Any particular fixed width is inherently stupid in some way. 78? 80? 132? 255? All crap. Still, having some fixed width is inherently useful. Encourages rea

by RhysU 13y ago

cmccabe 13y ago
Telling people to use 80 columns because "we inherited it" is just cargo-culting. Intelligent people will rebel against that. Instead, tell people the actual reasons why we use 80 columns. It is because your eyes have to physically move as you read a line of text. Forcing them to move too far causes excessive eyestrain. Additionally, when lines are excessively long, you lose your place in the document by the time you get to the end of the line. These are the same reasons why newspapers have multiple columns, even though it would be easy for them to put everything into a single giant column. Shorter columns are more readable. In a way, the question is akin to asking why we still have minimum font sizes even on "retina" displays. You can buy a monitor that can display teeny teeny fonts, but you can't buy eyeballs or a brain that can make sense of them. Similarly, you can easily have giant lines of code on any monitor from the last 20 years. But good luck reading them. There are some additional issues which are specific to computer code. One is that extremely long lines often come from excessive nesting, an antipattern.