But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more

That said, the best argument on line length is “the magic number 7, plus or minus 2”, our limits on short term memory. I like to be able to comprehend a line of code (or of text) in one glance, which seems to me to be about 65 characters, ignoring leading indentation; that might well be less than about 10 tokens. With wide tabs, that might well hit something around 90 characters, perhaps.

IMHO, it's not the line length that matters, but the number of tokens per line.

By the way, I like to work on laptops. If anyone knows where I can get a laptop with a 43" screen, please let me know.

This misses the point, same as Linus (which i honestly find surprising)... 80 width lines is a target to try to achieve _naturally_, if someone is splitting code by inserting unnatural breaks then they are trying too hard, OR there could be various other legitimate reasons like very long function names and naturally verbose PL syntax that make even longer line widths unreasonable. Regardless of width constraints many people will split the arguments of extremely long function signatures onto multiple lines out of preference anyway, then grep will still get stuck without more caring regex.

These arguments always emerge out of someone misinterpreting guides as absolutes. No one is arguing we need to stick to 80 column terminals otherwise everyone would autowrap their commits and we'd have horribly unreadable breaks everywhere. 80 is historical, but trying to keep code width short does improve legibility, 80 just turned out to be a pretty good human standard as well.

For example, if we had 10 meter-wide monitors we won't be able to see them entirely from a close distance. Increasing the distance will require to increase the font, so the number of characters per line we can use doesn't change much.

Not so long ago I showed a piece of code on a mobile phone to a colleague, saying he should use shorter lines. He replied I need a larger display. When I opened the same code on my desktop display the lines were not fitting the editor window almost the same as on the mobile screen. (The angular sizes of a mobile phone screen and individual characters on it are approximately the same as of the bigger screen and characters on it because we keep phone closer to eyes).

I currently work with a codebase where long lines are used and it is so inconvenient. When I switch to some 80-cols code it is such a relief.

We must strive to separate content and presentation, so people could choose whatever presentation they like (and have the editor do the wrapping as desired), for whatever whimsical reason that is nobody else’s business. It’s crazy to keep having this discussion and debating what the “research” indicates.

C’mon, haven’t we made any progress in forty years!? Everybody can have their own damn bikeshed, and paint it a different color every day.

Personally, I like to see more things happening in one screenful, so artificially imposed line breaks are really really annoying and break momentum when reading/scanning code.