While aesthetics is a highly subjective matter, good code tends to have a "paucity begets expressiveness" feeling. I.e. experienced programmers seem to have developed an intuition for finding succinct names for entities -- names that convey the underlying meaning to the onlooker at first glance. That style is accompanied by good structure with groups of usually shortish lines with meaningful empty lines in between. The result is like good minimalist prose or a poem: a consistent piece of thinking, a pause, another piece that follows naturally from the previous. Aesthetically, this style contradicts with verboseness, long lines and generally cramming things together. The latter usually convey the image of uncertainty -- i.e. the writer is only yet trying to find a way of succinct expression, feeling a bit disoriented in the domain or language and wanting to hide the lack of confidence behind verbosity and pompous style. After all, Python has zen built in, so lets walk the path of 'import this' and revere the beauty of PEP-8 :). So, personally, I'm -0 (not that my opinion matters of course, and, after all, this is classic bikeshedding) even though quite a few of the previous arguments supporting longer lines are sensible.