Back when I worked on a project with Thoughtbot I used to fight with them about this all the time :) 80 characters felt really restraining on anything but an 11

Back when I worked on a project with Thoughtbot I used to fight with them about this all the time :) 80 characters felt really restraining on anything but an 11inch MacBook Air. Limiting your ability to have descriptive names is a huge loss just to mindlessly follow some line convention from decades ago. I tend to like restraint, but when restraint is at odds with communicating to future developers I can't side with it. These days I try to keep lines 130 characters or less, likely just as random a number but at least more forgiving.