<story><title>The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card</title><url>http://pub.gajendra.net/2012/09/hollerith_tyranny</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benbenolson</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t doubt that the author&amp;#x27;s story is correct, but I think that 80 is a perfectly reasonable number to have as a standard. It&amp;#x27;s very annoying when I read code that doesn&amp;#x27;t use the 80-character limit, because my terminal is not guaranteed to be as wide as theirs, and I really don&amp;#x27;t like resizing my terminal window to fit their line length.&lt;p&gt;For car width, I think that that&amp;#x27;s also a pretty reasonable width, since it&amp;#x27;s the perfect width to fit two people side-by-side comfortably, with a bit of room in the middle.&lt;p&gt;Now we only need to think of things that have developed for historical purposes, yet are not reasonable defaults.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>s_kilk</author><text>Agreed, 80-chars may be an accident of history, but it&amp;#x27;s an accident which happens to line up quite well with the human eyes ability to track horizontal lines of text.&lt;p&gt;It gets tiring listening to devs rage about the 80-char limit, then go on to produce code that&amp;#x27;s basically unreadable because it scrolls way off the screen.</text></comment>
<story><title>The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card</title><url>http://pub.gajendra.net/2012/09/hollerith_tyranny</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benbenolson</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t doubt that the author&amp;#x27;s story is correct, but I think that 80 is a perfectly reasonable number to have as a standard. It&amp;#x27;s very annoying when I read code that doesn&amp;#x27;t use the 80-character limit, because my terminal is not guaranteed to be as wide as theirs, and I really don&amp;#x27;t like resizing my terminal window to fit their line length.&lt;p&gt;For car width, I think that that&amp;#x27;s also a pretty reasonable width, since it&amp;#x27;s the perfect width to fit two people side-by-side comfortably, with a bit of room in the middle.&lt;p&gt;Now we only need to think of things that have developed for historical purposes, yet are not reasonable defaults.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DanBC</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s very annoying when I read code that doesn&amp;#x27;t use the 80-character limit, because my terminal is not guaranteed to be as wide as theirs, and I really don&amp;#x27;t like resizing my terminal window to fit their line length.&lt;p&gt;Considering the numbers of programmers in the world, and how long they&amp;#x27;ve been working with text, and how much annoyance text breaks &amp;#x2F; line wrapping &amp;#x2F; format flowing causes it&amp;#x27;s kind of surprising that there isn&amp;#x27;t better ways of wrapping lines without line breaks.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s current best practice? Or is it just down to the project style guide?</text></comment>