How Reasonable are 80-Character Lines in 2020?

martyb writes:

Are 80 Characters Per Line Still Reasonable In 2020?

[...] In case of the Linux kernel, that's of course [Linus Torvalds], who has recently shaken up the community with a mailing list response declaring an overly common, often even unwritten rule of code formatting as essentially obsolete: the 80-character line limitation. Considering the notoriety of his rants and crudeness, his response, which was initiated by a line break change in the submitted patch, seems downright diplomatic this time.

[Linus]' reasoning against a continuing enforcement of 80-char line limits is primarly the fact that screens are simply big enough today to comfortably fit longer lines, even with multiple terminals (or windows) next to each other. As he puts it, the only reason to stick to the limitation is using an actual VT100, which won't serve much use in kernel development anyway.

Allowing longer lines on the other hand would encourage the use of more verbose variable names and whitespace, which in turn would actually increase readability. Of course, all to a certain extent, and [Linus] obviously doesn't call for abolishing line breaks altogether. But he has a point; does it really make sense to stick to a decades old, nowadays rather arbitrary-seeming limitation in 2020?

The article then gives an overview of the history of how 80 columns became the de facto standard width. Though mentioned briefly in passing, it all really got started with the invention of the punched card dating back to 1804 when "Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated a mechanism to automate loom operation". The physical size of the punch card used in the 1890 United States Census was the same as US currency at that time. The cards were then known as "Hollerith cards" after the inventor Herman Hollerith. Later, IBM came to dominate the field.

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