Aaron Rubin writes:
7) Python is designed to be written more like English than other programming languages. English is written horizontally, not vertically. In furtherance to an attempt to make "readability" an objective argument, here is a scientific study which finds that greater character width lines improve readability:
The reporting of the statistical analysis borders on deceptive, and the sample is very small. The procedure is described in insufficient detail, as well. I would not rely on this study (and in fact the study itself reports that other studies have come up with results preferring "medium" lengths of 55-60). In general, I think your arguments mostly come down to "the line length limitation makes it noticably harder to write code quickly" plus a little bit of "longer line lengths are maybe a little faster to read". But I think that's the wrong place to put the emphasis. It's much more important to make the code easy to read and understand. The study you cite reports that 55% of the subjects considered the 95 cpl format the most uncomfortable. I think that's a good reason to be wary of increasing line length.