I like the 80 limit. Makes me think harder about what I'm doing.
Some languages are naturally wider (Java, PHP, etc). I those, 120 is fine too.
Also, I tolerate comments past the 80th column but not code.
Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
121–130 of 180 posts
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#122Most of my code is pandas these days so chaining with a 40 char limit is usually fine ... Ducks.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#123> formatting tennis That's a paddling. Seriously, professionals do this? If someone else wrote it and it does what it is supposed to do, it is not, NOT (no apologies for shouty emphasis), my job to change that. (I hate tabs, but will never :retab someone else's code.) My job is either/both to fix bugs and add new capabilities, not to be precious about, well, anything. I would have serious reservations about any team…
Your comment is a bit strong, but, in my experience, it is normal to have a couple of average and below devs who only ever comment about formatting in a code review.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone else is going to be weird and want to look this up so I'll save you the trouble. Yes, aithrowawaycomm's claim about line lengths are supported by many, many different sources who recommend a 50 to 80 character line length. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=reading+optimal+line+length IMHO, 80 characters is too narrow, especially with Python, for most coding tasks so I settle more around 100 (+-20) characters. PEP-8 s…
It's worth noting that most of those studies are for body text. To make that more directly applicable we should exclude indentation, but the additional punctuation (especially commas, but unfortunately no parentheses) also affects it. Shading lines can also improve readability (this is known; the rest of this comment is speculation). It's probably not enough to simply alternating between e.g. white and off-white back…
Why exclude indentation? A block of code that is indented say... 5 levels deep at 4 spaces is missing 20 columns. If that loss of space gives the developer discomfort, it sounds like a healthy reminder about complexity. Every level of nested scope is additional mental context of "global" state for a maintainer. There should be (reasonable) pressure on the author to refactor towards less indentation/nested scope.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#125One thing I find sad is that of the 4 IDEs that I work with, most of which have an option to break done long line into several multiple line equivalents, none allow to do a word wrap smarter than that of notepad. They already implemented the refactoring tool, using it in rendering would probably not be a far fetch. That would allow us to get past handling line breaks manually and the invariant discussions and review…
That is a lot of IDEs! Why not use IntelliJ for everything... Or Eclipse or Visual Studio Code? I am pretty sure all three are uber polyglot at this point.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#126Just because some people like to have a single pane of text cover their entire 16:9 display doesn’t mean I should have to. I find very vertical text much easier to follow. Wide lines are usually wide due to nesting and chaining, either of blocks or of inline expressions. Both are a thing which should not be.
Concisely and clearly define one concept or abstraction. Then, use it in the next definition. This isn’t hard! And stop with the insanity-inducing compound names. If your name needs 5 subclauses to clarify its intent, your semantics are stupid and you should be beaten with a shoe.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Took me a second to realize ETA was "edited to add." I was very confused on what an estimated time of arrival meant, here. :) I'm surprised reading on a phone is common. Not at all something I would want to do. I'm assuming largely read only there? Makes me curious if the CWEB idea of styling specifically for reading has extra merit in that flow?
CWEB?
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth noting that most of those studies are for body text. To make that more directly applicable we should exclude indentation, but the additional punctuation (especially commas, but unfortunately no parentheses) also affects it. Shading lines can also improve readability (this is known; the rest of this comment is speculation). It's probably not enough to simply alternating between e.g. white and off-white back…
Why exclude indentation? A block of code that is indented say... 5 levels deep at 4 spaces is missing 20 columns. If that loss of space gives the developer discomfort, it sounds like a healthy reminder about complexity. Every level of nested scope is additional mental context of "global" state for a maintainer. There should be (reasonable) pressure on the author to refactor towards less indentation/nested scope.
It's an interesting point.
You can't have it both ways though - support hard line limits because the mere discomfort of long lines is insufficent to convince the programmer to refactor to something clearer, and then argue that the mere discomfort of the line limit including indentation should convince the programmer to refactor deeply nested code into something simpler. Which is it? Do we want to force limits with say a linter (80 characters of width max, 5 levels of nesting max) or let the programmer choose based on comfort?
I've had to implement things like an arbitrary-JSON formatter. Setting a fixed width including indentation doesn't work - there would always be (deeply nested) values you simply cannot print according to the rules (excluding, of course, strings which have their own difficulty). I kinda feel 80 characters excluding indentation works out ok in practice in a variety of settings.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#129Just because some people like to have a single pane of text cover their entire 16:9 display doesn’t mean I should have to. I find very vertical text much easier to follow. Wide lines are usually wide due to nesting and chaining, either of blocks or of inline expressions. Both are a thing which should not be. Concisely and clearly define one concept or abstraction. Then, use it in the next definition. This isn’t hard!…
> doesn’t mean I should have to.
I don’t believe the article says you should have to.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#130In my mind, it's a balance between expressing the flow of control/algorithm vs the details. You can have 20 long lines (admittedly, some blank because it helps readability) that show what is happening... or you can have 200 lines (because you broke out each argument to a function on it's own line, etc), making it much harder to look at the code and see what happening "overall".
Sometimes the details are more important, sometimes the flow of control/algorithm is.