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Why code lines still should not exceed 79 characters

3 points| mariambarouma | 3 years ago |moaboelez.medium.com

4 comments

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zenosmosis|3 years ago

I do a soft limit of 80, typically only ever exceeded by a comment w/ a link in it that might bust the cap.

Despite using a 4K display, it is nice to be able to put individual code windows side by side, multiple times, and be able to read it all w/o horizontal scrolling.

I also feel that a lot of code reaching past 80 characters could be refactored.

sylware|3 years ago

Kind of true, but 79 is really damn short after a few decades of coding. I did put myself a "soft" limit up to 100 chars.

I like powers of two and 128 felt really too much and 64 was really too short.

uberman|3 years ago

I kept my limit to 128 or 132 until I had to work in python. Any language that makes whitespace significant coupled with reasonably descripting naming makes that limit impractical imho.