In defence of 80-char lines

[rusi]

On Apr 4, 6:36 am, Steven D'Aprano <steve
+comp.lang.pyt... at pearwood.info> wrote:
> Although PEP 8 is only compulsory for the Python standard library, many
> users like to stick to PEP 8 for external projects.
>
> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
>
> http://blog.languager.org/2012/10/layout-imperative-in-functional.htmlith perhaps one glaring exception: many people hate, or ignore, PEP 8's
> recommendation to limit lines to 80 characters. (Strictly speaking, 79
> characters.)
>
> Here is a good defence of 80 char lines:
>
> http://wrongsideofmemphis.com/2013/03/25/80-chars-per-line-is-great/

The exchange on hacker news linked from there makes for a nice read --
tnx.

I had a blog article http://blog.languager.org/2012/10/layout-imperative-in-functional.html
on this subject. It started from a python discussion, though its more
relevant to Haskell.
What does not so easily come out there is that the wide-line code
samples I posted which read ok to me were not to some readers. So I
moved it to gist, but even there some would get the horizontal scroll
bar.  Reading it 'raw' seems to remove the problem -- though I can
hardly promise that for all devices.  So from this POV the point that
was made was opposite to the one I was trying to make =)

The discussion that followed on haskell cafe
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2012-October/104224.html
made a number of interesting points about pros and cons of long lines.