[jmull]

I'm not sure the author knows exactly what cargo cult means.

It seems like the perpetuation of the use of null-terminated strings is more about interoperability with what came before.

And like you suggest, 80 characters is at the limit of what people generally find comfortable reading. (I rely on editors to word-wrap code on-the-fly rather than insert line breaks manually... maybe that's what was meant? That's a tradeoff, though, since some tools don't do word-wrapping or don't do it well.)