Linus Torvalds rails against 80-character-lines as a de facto programming standard

• linux

  244 158,355 10.0 C

  Linux kernel source tree

  I wonder how he feels about this now: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17 where he very enthusiastically argues for 72 characters to a line in commit messages?

• libnest2d

  0 233 0.0 C++

  2D irregular bin packaging and nesting library written in modern C++

  I've regularly seen projects absolutely ruin their readability by adhering strictly to a character limit. You see excessive abbreviations, re-definitions of existing objects to create shorter names, line breaks in illogical places, etc.

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• COBOL.now

  0 15 0.0 COBOL

  Now is the time to COBOL!

  Oof, I remember being in school and they taught us COBOL for 3 semesters (this was late 1990s...) I had to go look what Github has that's COBOL and this is what I found.

• unmaintainable-code

  20 9,772 0.0

  A more maintainable, easier to share version of the infamous http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html

• Monocypher

  21 532 8.8 C

  An easy to use, easy to deploy crypto library

  When you're working on a leaf file with few (or no) dependencies, it's easy to keep function names short. Coupled with a 4-column indentation, it's really not that bad. Most of the time you'll get no more than 3 indentations, sometimes 4, for a total of 12-16 columns. That leaves 64-68 columns of actual text, which is not that tiny. Another reason to keep to a strict limit (be it 80 or 120) is when you're measuring your project size by the line of code. Allowing overly long lines would be a bit cheating. Here's an example of a strict 80-column limit. It mostly works for this particular case.

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