There's a reason that never in the last 3800 years since Proto-Sinaitic was the first human script to approximately represent phonemes, has text EVER been set at more than 80 characters as a widespread convention.
Large print sizes have existed for a long time, such as newspapers and broadsheets. Always and everywhere, in every human script, these limit column widths to something around 65 characters. They do this in Roman alphabets, in Greek, in Cyrillic, in Ethiopic, in Devanagari, in Armenian, in Georgian. Even Hangul which uses composed syllable blocks follows this. There are very few human universals. Line widths being normatively less than 80 characters is one of them. More than shared ethics, or diet, or religion, or social structures. The truest thing one can say about the human species is that our cognition works far better broken into units of fewer than 80 consecutive graphemes. On Mon, Feb 8, 2021, 1:36 AM David Mertz <me...@gnosis.cx> wrote: > Code is READ far more often than it is written! > > Lines more than 80-ish characters impose a rapidly increasing cognitive > and visual burden with every additional character. Really, starting at more > like 70 characters. It's not quite exponential in the harm, but it's > strongly super-linear, after the threshold. > > I use a 32" high res screen and run my terminal in full screen mode. Even > with eyes not quite so sharp as when I was younger, I can easily read about > 300 characters wide in a very legible font.[*] > > I ALMOST NEVER write lines that exceed 80 characters. If I am project lead > or technical manager I will first warn anyone who does, then fire them as > harmful to the project if they don't fix their habits. > > [*] Although my terminal is that big, I use tmux to have several panes of > useful width. The widest, central, one is something like 112 chars, but I > really don't want the rightmost part to show code EVER. > > On Sun, Feb 7, 2021, 8:20 PM Brendan Barnwell <brenb...@brenbarn.net> > wrote: > >> On 2021-02-07 09:59, Christopher Barker wrote: >> > All that being said, it's not that big a deal, and I personally don't >> > try to limit to 80 chars per line anyway -- preferring 90 or 95 -- I >> > haven't used a VT100 in decades .... >> >> To be honest I find it kind of ridiculous that people are still >> worrying about line lengths in this day and age. It's especially >> strange that people will talk about how a proposed feature interacts >> with relatively sophisticated editor/IDE features like syntax >> highlighting and autocompletion, yet still have no problem working with >> editors that are woefully limited on a much more basic feature. It's >> called line wrapping. >> >> We as humans should not be concerned with how long LOGICAL lines >> are >> until and unless it actually impinges on our ability to comprehend them. >> The appearance of the VISUAL line should not enter into our >> decision-making because that's a matter for the editor displaying the >> code. There's no reason not have lines that are 200 or 300 or even 1000 >> characters long if you want to (for instance for a long string literal); >> it's the editor's job to take a semantically-motivated set of lines and >> indentations and display them attractively. Then if different people >> have different preferences they can set their editors to different line >> widths and see the code in their preferred format. Editors that don't >> support such features need to be fixed and we shouldn't continue to >> enable them by insisting that people distort the semantic structure of >> their code to fit arbitrary guidelines like 80 or 95 characters. A >> person should insert a line break whenever they think it's a good idea >> for semantic reasons (e.g., separating statements) and not insert any >> when they don't think so, and leave the rest up to the editor. >> >> -- >> Brendan Barnwell >> "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no >> path, and leave a trail." >> --author unknown >> _______________________________________________ >> Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org >> To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org >> https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ >> Message archived at >> https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/UBDGX2TXQPWOMERIHF7U2Y7FK2H5346O/ >> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ >> >
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