[binary132]

Just because some people like to have a single pane of text cover their entire 16:9 display doesn’t mean I should have to. I find very vertical text much easier to follow. Wide lines are usually wide due to nesting and chaining, either of blocks or of inline expressions. Both are a thing which should not be.

Concisely and clearly define one concept or abstraction. Then, use it in the next definition. This isn’t hard! And stop with the insanity-inducing compound names. If your name needs 5 subclauses to clarify its intent, your semantics are stupid and you should be beaten with a shoe.

[jltsiren]

And some people like me prefer using large fonts, because my vision is not very good. The code pane in the full-screen VSCode window I have open on a 27" display is 145x37. Full-screen mode would add one more line. And those 145-character lines are typically enough for ~110 characters of code, because the editor adds various annotations.

That gives me an effective working space of 110x37. Any concept that needs longer lines or more lines is going to be harder to follow.

[sfpotter]

It's hard if you don't know how to do it... and lots of people don't know how to do it.

[binary132]

I mean, spelling the word “CAT” is hard if you don’t know how to do it, but as spelling goes, it’s pretty easy.

It’s true that some people are illiterate and never learned to spell. That doesn’t mean it’s hard, it just means they never learned how.

[ryandvm]

I don't mind an 80 or 100 character limit on code, but it boggles my mind that we're still inserting line breaks in comment blocks. Like, if you can't figure out how to get your editor to line-wrap comments then you're in the wrong business.

[acjohnson55]

There's still reason to use line breaks, because many editors / viewers will wrap at the viewport width, not earlier, which is not always desirable. Different content "wants" to be different max widths.

For instance, I think prose is hard to read when you have to scan long horizontal distances from line to line.

However, code often has indentation, syntax, and chains (e.g. nested property access) that take up a lot of width before the actual information is presented, so width is more helpful.

[binary132]

Code is not only used in modern editors. Sometimes it is used in HTML, sometimes it is used in emailed patches, sometimes it is read as plaintext in some other context, it may be read or manipulated over a remote shell session in a terminal that has only rudimentary tools available during a production problem. There are many contexts where source code should be cleanly and clearly formatted and comprehensible without assistance from modern GUIs.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Here you go, munch on a punch-card.

[binary132]

Delightful!

You know, there’s a reason cars and trains are the width that they are.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Is there? Or is that just a made up legend to justify rather arbitrary shit after the fact?

Enjoy your terminal troglodytis ;>

[duxup]

> doesn’t mean I should have to.

I don’t believe the article says you should have to.

[binary132]

What I mean is that if I’m working on a file with some other people, and I write some 80-column code, they can easily view it in their nice wide panes, but I can’t easily view their wide code in my nice tiled square or vertical panes. I often have as many as 8 (or more!) tiles in a single fullscreen window.