On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 8:40 AM, Simon Peyton Jones
| I used to be a 80 column guy, but moved away from that the last years. | But you are right, there must be an upper limit and, if >80 is a | problem for code reviews, then it's a reasonable choice.
As laptop screens have successively more horizontal pixels and fewer vertical pixels, longer lines use screen real estate better. 80 columns now seems a bit narrow to me. 100 would be better.
But I'm not going to die for this
Here we go! * Wider screens let you have several Emacs buffers next to each other. At 80 chars you can have about 2 buffers next to each other on a 13" screen. * The average line length is about 30-35 characters in Python. If it's anything similar in Haskell shorter line length are more efficient, looking how much of the lines times columns space is filled with characters. * The eye has trouble traveling back to the next line if lines get too long (at least when reading prose). Research says around 60-70 characters is optimal, if I recall correctly.