[reader_mode]

>Yes, for prose. And no one actually said easier, they said faster. Code is typically full of parenthesis special notations and characters. Nobody's speed-reading code. That doesn't make sense.

You speed read code all the time - when working on a codebase you can pinpoint the exact segment of a line you're interested without even parsing the whole line. For example if you're trying to modify an argument that's being passed from parent scope - you navigate there and just go to the argument on the caller - you don't read the previous arguments or call definition, you don't read surrounding lines, etc. you just know where you are and what you want to change.

Having a limit on width is very useful - but 80 is too constraining because of indentation and using descriptive names (assuming you don't obfuscate your function names, like you said an anti-pattern).

I personally like 120 characters :

- beyond that and the editor takes up too much horizontal space and my eyes need to jump too far from line start to end, I've worked on a ruby project that had unconstrained line length and it was a nightmare even after a year spent on the project

- below that I have to break too many lines that shouldn't really be broken, worked on a project in JavaScript that had 80 character limit as well a long time ago and it was a complete mess, it directly impacts the way you organise code and not in a good way IMO