Re:Treating JavaScript like a 30 year old language
by wickedchicken on Wednesday July 04, 2012 @04:30PM
(#4200769)
> 80 characters? I never had that limit for the 27 years of programming proceeding using the Google style guide and it never caused me any grief.
I didn't think that way until very recently, and then something occured to me: limiting things to 80 characters means you can fit more vertical strips of code on your screen without line breaks. On a 1920x1080 screen with a 6x13 font[1], I can split vim into 4 vertical strips each of which are 79 characters wide. It's not perfect, but it means that my screen is filled with code instead of whitespace. Keeping code width low is like dyanmic-range compression[2] for code.
I didn't think that way until very recently, and then something occured to me: limiting things to 80 characters means you can fit more vertical strips of code on your screen without line breaks. On a 1920x1080 screen with a 6x13 font[1], I can split vim into 4 vertical strips each of which are 79 characters wide. It's not perfect, but it means that my screen is filled with code instead of whitespace. Keeping code width low is like dyanmic-range compression[2] for code.
[1] -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1 (I have yet to find a more readable font with those metrics, and I've looked hard) [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression