Why is this a thing in languages that are not Fortran 77?
Why not a 1000 character long line?
If I want the editor to overflow it below or show me a scrollbar should be my choice.
Why not a 1000 character long line?
If I want the editor to overflow it below or show me a scrollbar should be my choice.
In those circumstances, it makes sense to optimize for readability to everyone rather than the author’s personal preferences. One can easily argue that Google’s style isn’t optimal, but it’s harder to argue that a personal preferences free for all is optimal.
The other fact is that few devs craft their code to fit 80 characters. Instead they write code and let formatters do their thing. But automated formaters are doing a horrible job, aka if I write a line that is 81 characters long, they will massacre it to a set of unreadable lines with no proper aligning.
So now we are at the mercy of automated formatters that try to enforce an arbitrary constraint that is irrelevant with today's code editing/reviewing technologies.
I work in a codebase where a previous dude constantly did this. I do not find those lines amusing.
Whenever I'm un-fucking his stuff one of the first things to do is expand his infinite lines into usually 5-50 lines because visualizing and reasoning about 50 lines of code crammed into one requires someone who is totally a way, way better programmer than me.
I don't need to git blame to know when the code was written by that guy.
The actual limit should be the complexity of one lihe, something like the number of AST nodes in it. But our tools which go back all the way to mechanical teletypes and punched cards are firmly line-oriented. This allows them to be language-agnostic.