Did I randomly hallucinate that 74 or 75 characters used to be a popular line length limit? I've been using 74 ever since I learned what a formatter is because it was the smallest number I heard of until then, but now I can't find any source for this.

Before anyone complains, I prefer short lines whenever I get a say because my eyes are pretty bad and I want to be able to use a large font on a 14" laptop.

i remember that was something around 80. But also not quite sure.

Wasn't it because console applications were 80 chars back in the days? I used 255 char size for mysql columns back in the days not knowing why. Was also some default

Found this:

"Another common line length limit in the days of fixed pitch fonts was 72 characters. Examples: Fortran code, mail, news."

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/...

Get one or more big monitors at home and in the office - and upgrade to a line length of 120.

It has become almost impossible to enforce lower line lengths outside of the Cobol mines and is generally not worth fighting waging war over.

120 is pretty common now.

Longer becomes too stressful to read - eyes play ping pong.

120 characters would not allow me to use a comfortable font size even on a large 16.5" laptop. When I'm the one writing the formatter config, I'm not gonna prevent myself form working on the go.

@retoor

80 char length was standard because in the 70's, you didn't have personal computers.

What we call a terminal now, was then an actual terminal, hardware one, with a screen that could only fit 80 characters, therefore, that length was enforced to prevent spurious line breaks that were not always handled so gracefully.

Nowadays, with PCs and own monitors with real drawing capabilities, it's up to taste.

I myself have seen commonly (and do use) 130 char length lines.

I'm not interested in what the most popular standard is, the most popular standard always fits the average able bodied developer. 80 is what Python uses and I'll go for that too, it's a real standard and not an arbitrary number and it fits my situation.

@retoor 255 is the excel default, that's why we use it a lot. we work with a lot of imports from file

@darksideofyay oh no

@lorentz I won't sleep until you released your programming language on github

It's Fortran, the number of bytes on a punch card and therefore the width of a terminal is 80 but the first 6 are reserved for line numbers so the effective line length is 74.