On Jan 08, 2025, nick wrote:
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> I am also a firm believer in lines of 80 columns. This occasionally brings me into conflict with younger colleagues who see this as arbitrary and generally are using IDEs in which any width can be displayed. Usually they have multiple, huge monitors and smallish letters, so they think "why not!".

Something is amiss then, this is coming across as a single long line,
rather than broken at 80 char (or less).

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> I haven't heard it articulated before why 80 (or indeed 72) columns is a good thing. I guess in my case it's because I usually use a laptop screen with largeish letters, but also just for the sake of standardization. My feeling is there must be a limit, so the limit should be defined. The value is unimportant, if we could all agree on 132 characters (does anyone remember dot matrix printers that could print 80 columns normal size, 132 condensed?) , then that would be okay with me, but the consensus does seem to be 80.
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I believe the origins are because "80 characters" to a line is roughly
on par with 10-12 point font like you'd get out of a teletype machine
(or typewriter, etc), so the first character displays just targeted
that. Now it's probably more "convention" than anything.

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