The choice for me is simple:

If I'm going to view the code I'm writing in a 80x24 terminal later on, I'll break that lines, and will try really hard to not get closer to 80 chars per line.

If that code is only going to be seen in Eclipse and only by me, I won't break that lines.

I omitted your other examples for brevity.

Having bigger screens doesn't make longer lines legit or valid. I may have anything between 4-9 terminals open on my 28" 2K screen anytime, and no, I don't want to see lines going from one side to another like spikes, even if I have written them.

When dealing with tabular data, particularly test data, I find most formatting lacking. I want to be able to specify blocks that align on the decimal point. Especially when dealing with lists of dicts. This makes reading test fixtures much more intuitive than default indentation styles.

Has anyone seen a formatter where you can specify a block be formatted in that manner?

  [{'a':  3.89, 'b':  10},
   {'a': 12.3,  'b': 233}]

  [{'a': 3.89,
    'b': 10},
   {'a': 12.3,
    'b': 233}]

80 characters is a bit on the low end imo but I'd rather have the code be too vertical than too horizontal. Maybe 120-150 is a more reasonable limit. It's not difficult to stay within those bounds as long as you don't do deep nesting which I don't really want to see anyway because it's hardly ever necessary and it makes code more difficult to read.

80 is for aholes who like to use small laptop and then force it on everyone else. 120/150 is reasonable.

200 is great.

And the laptop excuse is not even valid, I used a 11" MacBook Air for 10 years and even back then 80 always felt extremely limiting for me.

I just tested and: even when zooming +1 on VSCode and leaving the minimap open I can fit 140 chars without any horizontal scroll.

People demanding 80 columns always have some crazy setups, like an IDE where the editor is just a minuscule square in the centre, like an Osbourne 1 computer.

If you can live with a single file on screen that's great, but the utility of two is far greater than having a chunk of the screen empty most of the time because of a few long lines.

One reason I like longer lines, in those very few cases (way less than 1% of code lines) - it bundles logically several easy-to-read things, ie more complex 'if' or larger constructors. We talk about Java here just to be clear, for more compact languages those numbers can get lower significantly but same principles apply.

Doing overly smart complex one-liners just for the sake of it goes completely against what we write here, I've seen only (otherwise smart) juniors do those. Harder to debug, harder to read, simply a junior show-off move.

...unless you really want to prove grandparent's point.

Now get off my lawn you punks!

I am.

And that's why I said I use the zoom in VSCode in my previous message. My font is big as fuck compared to everyone else.