Am I the only developer who preferS long lines?
Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
81–90 of 180 posts
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#82>at a comfortable 10 point font size. How lovely for you. As someone with significantly impaired vision, even when corrected, I have my font size set to 18, thank you very much. A coding standard that assumes a 10 point font size would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act's 'reasonable accommodation' mandate. I wasn't pushy enough to act on it, but it sure pissed me off when my fellow team members blew off my…
> A coding standard that assumes a 10 point font size would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act's 'reasonable accommodation' mandate.
Would it? You can still set the size to 18, you just might have to scroll or line wrap. That's a mild inconvenience, not "inaccessible".
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#83>at a comfortable 10 point font size. How lovely for you. As someone with significantly impaired vision, even when corrected, I have my font size set to 18, thank you very much. A coding standard that assumes a 10 point font size would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act's 'reasonable accommodation' mandate. I wasn't pushy enough to act on it, but it sure pissed me off when my fellow team members blew off my…
> A coding standard that assumes a 10 point font size would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act's 'reasonable accommodation' mandate.
Would it? I don't think having to make all my lines 44% shorter than they should be is reasonable; that's going to be a massive impingement on productivity.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO 120 is the extreme limit but a good limit. Anything higher than 120 is to long and, personally, I'd ask for that to be fixed in a code review.
120 is way too small. IMO 180 is a good limit. We're not on 800x600 screens anymore
Lots of people are using split screen editors though. Tbh if you are butting up against the 120 limit, you're probably doing something wrong and could easily break the lines, or use less levels of indentation.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#85> 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…
Since we’re already on a Holy War About Arbitrary Things topic (and at the risk of igniting the whitespace wars anew), do you mind expanding on this? > I hate tabs This opinion seems common but I haven’t seen a practical argument against tabs among practical arguments (for an admittedly niche situation) in favor of tabs. This seems an appropriate place to ask about it.
tabs are not great in Python because they can hide spaces, and that causes the code to break. in other code? i guess tabs are nicer because people can size them as they like on their devices.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#86An 80 character limit is difficult to stay within when using highly descriptive variable names, and I think the benefits of highly descriptive variable names outweigh other considerations.
Perhaps instead of using highly descriptive variable names, use reasonably descriptive variable names?
Names that are too long impair readability rather than helping it. You want names that are as long as necessary to meaningfully, semantically distinguish identifiers in a given context, but not any longer.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#87It's as relevant as the 4:3 aspect ratio still being the best as it correlates to the physical properties of our eyes.
That said and knowing that nearly every modern day OS is capable of resolution independent functioning; we should start rendering interfaces based on the distance from the eyes to the screen and it's size.
Someone probably already did the math on this.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#88One minor advantage which wasn’t so relevant in 2008: 80 character lines are much easier to read on a smartphone. This is especially true for Safari on iOS, which always seems to make bad wrapping / sizing decisions with plain text. ETA: thinking back on it, several years ago I switched from 120 characters to 80 specifically because of this. I don’t have a car, so I read a lot of code on my phone while taking public…
On the other hand, horizontal scrolling on a touchscreen is more natural than with a mouse.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#8980 characters is way, way too short. I think 120 is a decent spot for today's displays, although I don't mind even longer than that either.
No it's not, it's perfect. You want to be able to do side-by-side diffs on your laptop using a normal sized (not tiny) font. You want to be able to paste snippets into design documents and emails and blogs without accidental wrapping or truncating or scrolling. 80 is nicely legible. It works really well.
Actually no I don’t want to be able to work like that on a laptop monitor. I’d rather optimize my full screen real estate. There in lies the conflict.
Re: Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
#90>at a comfortable 10 point font size. How lovely for you. As someone with significantly impaired vision, even when corrected, I have my font size set to 18, thank you very much. A coding standard that assumes a 10 point font size would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act's 'reasonable accommodation' mandate. I wasn't pushy enough to act on it, but it sure pissed me off when my fellow team members blew off my…
Write tiny functions because of aesthetics; not because the flow calls for it ಠ_ಠ