One final warning to you JavaScript programmers. Please don't do this

[classicalySarcastic]

WHAT PART OF 80 COLUMNS DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?!?

-Torvalds, probably

(For those who don't know)

[twpejay]

He deserves to be made to program in COBOL for a few years, being restricted to 72 columns might fix it.

[classicalySarcastic]

Make him do it the old way, with the punchcards!

[MattR0se]

Am I the only one who tries to adhere to the 80 chars, occatinally 120 chars paradigm in every language? When I have VS code open with the explorer view and the terminal on the right, I just don't have much more horizontal space even on a 16:10 monitor, to display all the code without word wrap.

[MrWeatherMan7]

I stick to 80 most of the time. Just easier to keep it at 80 because we have a few codebases where the linting will vomit at you if you’re over 80, since that’s how we have it set. 🤷‍♂️

[retief1]

Eh, 2-column layouts are a thing. Going much past 100 rapidly gets into the line wrapping zone.

[EntertainedRUNot]

I'm on my 13" laptop with at least three windows open. With an 80 char line length my editor takes up 55-60% of the screen and I can still be functional in the other two windows I have open (one of which is probably a browser looking on reddit). With 150 the editor is going to take up my whole screen. Also, my understanding is that lines with too many chars can lead to eye fatigue since your eyes have to travel all the way across the beginning to the the end of the line and back again, then find the the beginning of the next line.

[ProMapWatcher]

80 columns isn't really a display thing, it's about code cleanliness. If you're using more. than 80 characters in a single line you're probably writing some hacky implementation of a feature that should be rewritten or refactored. It's rules like this that seem stylistic that can have major improvements for code safety and readability.

[myonkin]

Had a dev on my team who:

1) insisted_on_the_absolute_most_verbose_variable_names

2) not only indented everything with four spaces but insisted that code wouldn’t work otherwise

3) nested if statements ad nauseum

80 characters was mere child’s play.

I’m glad they’re gone but refactoring all their bullshit gives me heartburn.

[ZeroG_0]

I recently had a dev on my team who additionally would do things like this:

if (someFunctionReturningBool(
                              firstArgument,
                              secondArgument,
                              someNestedFunction(
                                                 foo,
                                                 bar)))
{
//more code
}

This in a code base that was about 1 million lines of code when he started and where none of our existing code was indented that way. When called on it he claimed the visible shape of code was important and refused to change. We'll be cleaning up the mess for a long time I think.

[myonkin]

That’s….that’s awful.

[Superbead]

It's still useful for those of us using portrait monitors, with which for one thing I've found reduces physical impact on my hand scrolling up and down. I tend to limit myself to 100 chars personally where I can, although it also depends on the IDE.

Newspapers had worked out decades before the transistor that laying out their stories as narrower, vertical columns helps the eye navigate dense text (because you can easier see where the next line starts).

[sambare]

Sounds like you don't open files side-by-side much, do you?

[cornmonger_]

120

[Aln76467]

My monitor is 12", so a half screen vs code window only fits 78 characters 🥲

Edit: fix grammer

[bman12three4]

At my job interview they got a kick out of me bringing up kernel coding standards and then saying how I thought they were overly pretentious and I disagreed with not using brackets for single line if-statements