When I get tired of actually arguing for 80 columns (legibility, shorter names, fewer indent levels, etc) I just say that "God made the VT-100 with 80 columns for a reason" (which is amusingly incorrect on many levels).
Without arguing about 80 columns being optimal or not, this is the author's habit:
> I frequently have two or more editor windows next to each other, sometimes also with one or two extra terminal/debugger windows next to those. To make this feasible and still have the code readable, it needs to fit “wrapless” in those windows.
It's not clear whether the terminals are horizontally next to each other, however one must consider that in his calculations, there is the presupposition of extra programs (other than the editor) horizonally stacked on the same screen. The sky is the limit, with such presupposition.
I still contend that 40 columns should be the maximum, as in addition to the editor, any sane, productive developer should keep one or two terminals, the team chat, and the music player stacked horizontally on the same screen. /s
It really depends on the language, but 40-columns is actually not bad if you are programming for an 8-bit computer in BASIC.
One should avoid having overly long, multi-statement lines anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
“A 12-row/80-column IBM punched card from the mid-twentieth century”
The hardware was produced to match the fixed limitations.
Note: even with 12 rows a punched card traditionally stored only one line of the source text. That allowed editing by replacing one or more cards.
Also, even more details:
The cards were one of the reasons CRT-based terminals such as the 2260 and 3270 had 80 characters per line (VT-52 had 64 and there was some 3270-like terminal w/ 40 columns.
Never said anything else. The rows I've mentioned were clearly the rows of bits (represented by presence or absence of a hole). From a pure theoretical point of view it still appears to be wasteful (as the used character set encodings didn't use all representations of 12 bits), but there were "good enough" reasons behind that decision too: It all started from the design of the tabulating punched card from the 19th century, and from every digit 0-9 having its own row, and two more rows for other marks. The hardware depended on these properties.
125 years ago, the logic I've described was already there, 12 rows but still less columns on this card:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hollerith_Punched_Card.jp...
Increasing the number of columns was obviously later technical improvement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#IBM_80-column_for...
I paid for the whole monitor, I'm gonna use the whole monitor!
But how often do you really have 80 columns? With indentation you chip away on the left side and with a few indentation levels you have not as much space left.
One level of indentation for the module/class level and another one for a method. Already at two levels.
Within a method, two levels of indentation are by far not extreme.
/me slaps forehead.