80 character limit

Pros:

• Forces you to focus on legibility.

  • Emphasis on short.

• Encourages preserving source control blame

• Long lines raises concerns on naming

Cons:

• Some languages may not be suitable for 80 characters.

• Can make some functions or conditions longer

  • When writing conditions, consider breaking them into multiple conditions. See below for reasoning.

• The focus on short may may become bad.

  • Example: Bad variable names.

  • Example: Too many small functions. Makes it difficult to understand flow.

  • Aim for balance.

Considerations:

• Not everyone has the same screen size as you

• Choose the lowest common denominator

  • How many characters can comfortably in the tools you use?

    • GitHub split diff views

      • 13" MacBookPro on "More Space" Resolution (1680x1050) can only comfortably show 104 characters

      • 1280px width can comfortably show 87 characters.

        • General width of my windows when tiled on a desktop monitor

    • See my testing

Exceptions:

• URLs. Always try to use full URLs as much as possible as it helps the reader to intuit the purpose of the URL.

Notes:

• Python recommends 79 characters
• I've tested out character length on different sites
• AirBNB

  • JavaScript: 100 characters
  • Ruby: 100 characters
• Google

  • C++: 80 characters
  • Java: 100 characters
  • JavaScript: 80 characters
  • Python: 80 characters
  • Swift: 100 characters