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

Re:um news flash

[black mariah]

Really? Then how to you recommend people still using vt100 terminals cope?

Buy a real fucking computer?

What about people using PDA or cellphone-based ssh clients?

See above.

slrn? Mutt?

Join the rest of us in a fucking GUI by, well,, BUYING A REAL FUCKING COMPUTER.

I generally find those who advocate ditching the 80-column standard are the same ones who have no problem with HTML-ized email.

I fucking hate HTML email, and 80 columns is fucking stupid. Write to whatever width the code needs, stupid fucking cellphones be damned.

Re:huh?

[0x0d0a]

I think that all right-thinking people use emacs, not vi. That being said, what about fmt logfile >logfile-formatted?

Re:um news flash

[black mariah]

Typical. Bringing up things that are marginally related to the discussion in order to make yourself look smart.

I never mentioned a fucking thing about XML, dipshit, and in fact I stated that I hate HTML emails so you can very easily guess, unless you're a dumbass, that I don't like XML as it pertains to email or text messages very much either.

We're talking about how many columns to use for plain text. This is a stupid fucking argument. You use as many as are neccesary. Any text editor/display should wrap it (and UNwrap it, something I wish nedit did) automatically. If what your using is so archaic that it can't even handle that, you SERIOUSLY need to invest in new hardware. If you can't change the system for business reasons (legacy hardware), then you probably have internal ways of dealing with it already. If you can't for other reasons (no money. Been there.), you just have to deal with it on your own and not expect the rest of the world to bend over and take it because you can't keep up.

I'd have thought by now that we'd be done with the 'lowest common denominator' in all but specialized areas. I thought programmers hated irrational limitations.