PEP8 and line length

Ideas
61

No, there is no sharp number 88 anywhere, and I am not an expert on typography, so I cannot cite you any research papers on the topic. I am not even willing to fight for any particular number. Only after plenty of time spent with LaTeX and obsessive studying of related literature on typography, I have learnt that “something more than 60 characters per line but not much” is one of the most fundamental rules which govern everything. People are claiming that 80 characters per line is just an accident of the first monitors. That may be true, but the much more important question is “Why the made screens so that they would fit 80 characters on its line?”. If you look at many good typographies for regular paper (e.g., this paper from Bell Labs, this introduction of Unix, or this thesis LaTeX template), they struggle with putting just not too many characters on a line when the size of paper (both Letter and A4) was intended for typewriter writing with much more wide Courier characters, so they have either crazy wide margins or double column typesetting.

TL;DR: I don’t care about the line length in 80ish neighbourhood, but I would be against 120+ or even unlimited line length.

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62

I was not protesting anything really, in my original comment I asked what the research was that made mypy conclude 88 lines was optimal, since the original source for “90-ish” is just that video afaik.

I think there are many compelling arguments for keeping the current status quo in CPython, although for my projects I don’t care too much about line length. But I have the privilege to set my own limits and the discussions around disability have been illuminating.

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