80 chars per line is great

Re:80 chars per line is great by GhotiFish on Monday March 25, 2013 @10:50AM (#5437235)

This isn't about the indentation. Look at the examples. you can see that allot of his code is indented heavily.

This is about the amount of time and distance required to scan my eyes across a line to understand its meaning. How much do I have to read to understand a simple concept?

This is also about the amount of screen real-estate i have to use. We arn't programming on VT100 terminal any more, damn right. NOW I get to have the compiler output and continuous integration output to my left. The directory, class structure and documentation to my right.

I also get to split my screen to have two editors open for comparing snippets of code line by line.

Merge conflicts and diffing are hugely common operations. merges have three parallel windows open at once!

You, still, only have 80 characters to work with.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:80 chars per line is great by ajanuary on Monday March 25, 2013 @10:55AM (#5437272)

    This isn't about the indentation.

From TFA:

    Also, having the mandatory indentation whitespace increase the line width is a good visual way of minimising the nested loops in your code and suggesting, in a subtle way, to refactor anything that is indented more than about four times.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:80 chars per line is great by scarmig on Monday March 25, 2013 @12:51PM (#5438022)

Your line from TFA is 241 characters, making it a pain to read....

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:80 chars per line is great by GhotiFish on Monday March 25, 2013 @11:08AM (#5437353)

yah, but I think the author is arguing side benefits.

to be fair, so am I.

The author was asserting 80 character line width was easier to read.

[ Parent | on HN ]