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by sneak 1869 days ago
80 characters is a widely-agreed-upon standard, and standards with lots of buy-in are useful for a variety of reasons, regardless of origin.

Units of precisely 20 feet is also a standard, used mostly in countries that use SI. It doesn't diminish the value or utility of containerization.

1 comments

Yes standards useful and workplaces can easily enforce their own internal ones for things like line length limits. But they are useless if they do not work for everyone who they apply to and especially not if they don't adapt to world around them. Cubit used to be a standard, too! But then we developed better ways to measure things than our inconsistently sized forearms.