Is the 80 Columns Limit Dead?

Dancing Primate asks: "Reading through the code of co-workers and various open source projects, I'm finding that people are no longer formatting their code to 80 columns. With most people using X and the wide range of non-vi editors, is the 80 column limitation disappearing? Am I the only one who gets grumpy when I do a diff or print code, and it's hard to read?"

Comments

The Way of the World

[Jason Scott]

As the administrator of TEXTFILES.COM, I can attest that it is certainly the case that modern writers who submit me works for the uploads section generally pay little or no attention to formatting along any given column length. Keep in mind that I always ask for these submissions in ASCII form, so this isn't the result of converting over from Word or StarOffice.

I think the reason I get files like this one is that people just let notepad and similar programs do the wrap for them. The fact that web browsers don't always wrap means you get some pretty funky looks.

This is not 100 percent true, of course: I've gotten submissions just this year that keep to the 80 column limit and include formatting taking advantage of it.

But on the whole, I think it's just that people no longer think of the world as sized in 80 columns, and we might as well understand that's the case. My heart will always be for the way it used to be, of course.

Re:huh?

[Rheingold]

You obviously haven't used the stock vi in Solaris recently...

Terminal too wide

Readability

[rangek]

It is well known that beyond a certain width, readability drastically decreases. Here are some more links:

Some random "web development" site

Scroll down a bit to get to the chars per line bit

All of these basically agree that more than 80 chars per line is quite hard to read.

Re:I'm sorry...

[0x0d0a]

The main reason for it is that (a) it lets people with default-width xterms and terminals read your code, and (b) it provides a reasonably universal standard to code around.

80 col seems pretty unused in the Windows world, where most people use that godawful Visual Studio Editor, and conventions are to extend lines to infinity.

80 col is common in the *IX world, where most folks doing a lot of coding are using emacs/xemacs or vi. Space-indented, 80 col code can be read by pretty much anyone and edited by anything, so it's a reasonably universal standard to base code on.

Some projects deviate from this -- it's considered good open source etiquette to stick with the format already being used in the file that you're hacking on, instead of mixing things up.

That being said, I rather like the idea of python's approach (where how the user chooses to view code, wrapped or scrolling, is independent of the storage format).