Code is READ far more often than it is written!
Lines more than 80-ish characters impose a rapidly increasing cognitive and visual burden with every additional character. Really, starting at more like 70 characters. It's not quite exponential in the harm, but it's strongly super-linear, after the threshold.
I use a 32" high res screen and run my terminal in full screen mode. Even with eyes not quite so sharp as when I was younger, I can easily read about 300 characters wide in a very legible font.[*]
I ALMOST NEVER write lines that exceed 80 characters. If I am project lead or technical manager I will first warn anyone who does, then fire them as harmful to the project if they don't fix their habits.
[*] Although my terminal is that big, I use tmux to have several panes of useful width. The widest, central, one is something like 112 chars, but I really don't want the rightmost part to show code EVER.
On 2021-02-07 09:59, Christopher Barker wrote:
> All that being said, it's not that big a deal, and I personally don't
> try to limit to 80 chars per line anyway -- preferring 90 or 95 -- I
> haven't used a VT100 in decades ....
To be honest I find it kind of ridiculous that people are still
worrying about line lengths in this day and age. It's especially
strange that people will talk about how a proposed feature interacts
with relatively sophisticated editor/IDE features like syntax
highlighting and autocompletion, yet still have no problem working with
editors that are woefully limited on a much more basic feature. It's
called line wrapping.
We as humans should not be concerned with how long LOGICAL lines are
until and unless it actually impinges on our ability to comprehend them.
The appearance of the VISUAL line should not enter into our
decision-making because that's a matter for the editor displaying the
code. There's no reason not have lines that are 200 or 300 or even 1000
characters long if you want to (for instance for a long string literal);
it's the editor's job to take a semantically-motivated set of lines and
indentations and display them attractively. Then if different people
have different preferences they can set their editors to different line
widths and see the code in their preferred format. Editors that don't
support such features need to be fixed and we shouldn't continue to
enable them by insisting that people distort the semantic structure of
their code to fit arbitrary guidelines like 80 or 95 characters. A
person should insert a line break whenever they think it's a good idea
for semantic reasons (e.g., separating statements) and not insert any
when they don't think so, and leave the rest up to the editor.
--
Brendan Barnwell
"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no
path, and leave a trail."
--author unknown
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