Good riddance. If we pick a new suggested width, maybe it shouldn't be based on a 1928 punch card standard.
But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more
31–40 of 330 posts
Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more
#32The problem here is that our editors aren't smart enough to wrap code appropriately. Word processors know to wrap lines on word boundaries; a smart code editor should be able to wrap lines and indent parameters in a human-pleasing way as you drag a window wide or narrow.
I think most editors these days do a pretty decent job? It's not perfect, of course, but 99% of the time it's fairly readable.
Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more
#33This!! At people are insisting we use a max of 80 columns for the linter. It's a huge pain compared to 100 or 130 columns and doesn't help readability. Everytime someone tries to argue for it I want to suggest we swap their Mac for a Commodore 64...
Well, the C64 had a 40 column display width for the BASIC interpreter, but I think it was possible to have statements that wrapped and could go up to 80 characters (I may be wrong about that though).
Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more
#34Isn’t there some merit to the notion that long lines are typically either overly verbose or mentally challenging to understand?
I think so, but it's still inconvenient when a length limit applies to something reasonable.
Applying a short limit to solve the problem of any single line becoming overly-complex will have other consequences. Most obviously, it's going to push some developers into bad habits re: naming things, where variable names that have more meaning than a counter become single letters.
Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more
#35I wonder how Linus feels about tabs vs. spaces (I didn't read the entire post, so maybe he addressed it?)
In the post he refers to "wide tabs" which means hard tabs displayed 8 chars long. This has been the standard kernel style since the beginning.
Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more
#36Typical ill-considered comment from Linus, and surprising for someone getting on his years. Column width is an accessibility issue . I'm barely in my mid 30s and the average font size has been steadily creeping, maybe 1.5 pts per 5 years. I could tolerate 132 column files today, but by the time I'm 50 there is no way this will work, regardless of screen size
Do you need reading glasses? I found I did (I'm 47) and it made a massive difference in looking at code- I can use a smaller font and experience much less eye strain.
Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more
#37Typical ill-considered comment from Linus, and surprising for someone getting on his years. Column width is an accessibility issue . I'm barely in my mid 30s and the average font size has been steadily creeping, maybe 1.5 pts per 5 years. I could tolerate 132 column files today, but by the time I'm 50 there is no way this will work, regardless of screen size
Buy a bigger monitor. Or get glasses. I'm 38, rocking a 43" 4k monitor. There's so much room. Scale things up or down to your comfort level. It's a pleasure if you use an editor like atom.
Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more
#38This!! At people are insisting we use a max of 80 columns for the linter. It's a huge pain compared to 100 or 130 columns and doesn't help readability. Everytime someone tries to argue for it I want to suggest we swap their Mac for a Commodore 64...
80 columns on a C64 is a real reach. You need special hardware (or horribly slow & fuzzy text) for that.
Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more
#39I guess most of us, pragmatic people, agree that 80 columns is not a sane standard anymore.
The more interesting question is "what would be a good default line length in 2020?"
I vote for 120 columns.
Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more
#40I agree that 80 is too small in 2020, and hasn't been since around 80x25=2000, but LLVM is stuck at 80 columns [1]. I'd be interested to see a canvas of other big projects.
[1] https://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html#source-code-width