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Comment by lacampbell | Hacker News Reader

Every moment working with python (and that infernal pep-8 linter insisting 80 characters is a sensible standard in 2019)

It's a very sensible standard. There's a reason most books are taller than they are wide. The fact that we have bigger screens now doesn't change it.

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This is about as sensible to me as saying it is a good idea because most trains are longer than they are wide. Who cares about those things, we use computers that nearly all have 4:3 or 16:~10 displays (or wider), and many of use use more than one of them.

Display size has nothing to do with it. Long lines are hard to read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length

I obviously don't agree, but it is worth noting that comparing typographic conventions for English with typographic conventions for code is not a very good idea, to me. Especially when we're discussing a language with semantically active whitespace.

A 100 character line might only see 15-70 characters of active use.

While this is a fair point, pylint bumps the limit to something like 100 characters, and you can split deeply nested logic into separate functions with ease.

HN has ~200 char lines and I find it easy to read long bikeshed arguments.

Are you implying short and wide trains would be sensible? I like using a wide screen for programming, but prefer code formatted to 80 chars. That allows me to have two vertical windows of code open side by side. It also makes it easier to use things like a graphical diff to merge code.

Well they'd be interesting, I guess. Maybe they are already short and wide and they're like crabs that scuttle to their side?

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