- prose and comments are greatly improved with shorter lines (I switched to reader mode to read the post)
- a logical code line often exceeds optimal prose length (70-80), due to indentation, syntax, language idioms etc
- code is more sparse and much less visually homogenous than prose, which means code can have longer lines without causing "staccation return issues"
- it is technically easy and non-destructive to auto wrap in-editor for display output (long source -> shorter display)
- it's ambiguous and hard for an editor to "unwrap" (short source -> longer display)
- grepping source works better with less wrapping
- diff tool UIs seem to struggle with long lines, today
- some single identifiers are commonly longer than 80 - such as URLs
- comments and code doesn't have to have the same max length
Linus got it right in this case imo. In the future, I'd be curious about ubiquitous and standardized auto-wrapping in editors so that you can set whatever length you damn please without imposing it on everyone else.
- prose and comments are greatly improved with shorter lines (I switched to reader mode to read the post)
- a logical code line often exceeds optimal prose length (70-80), due to indentation, syntax, language idioms etc
- code is more sparse and much less visually homogenous than prose, which means code can have longer lines without causing "staccation return issues"
- it is technically easy and non-destructive to auto wrap in-editor for display output (long source -> shorter display)
- it's ambiguous and hard for an editor to "unwrap" (short source -> longer display)
- grepping source works better with less wrapping
- diff tool UIs seem to struggle with long lines, today
- some single identifiers are commonly longer than 80 - such as URLs
- comments and code doesn't have to have the same max length
Linus got it right in this case imo. In the future, I'd be curious about ubiquitous and standardized auto-wrapping in editors so that you can set whatever length you damn please without imposing it on everyone else.