But should you have that line at all? And should it be at 80 characters? Nothing can touch it or I need to break up the line. Not just why is it 80, but should it be 80? And to share my biases right now, going into this, in my VS code, I have a line drawn at a hundred characters, and this line is lava. Why is 80 characters the standard limit for code width? Why 80? Why not 79 or 81 or even 100? It wasn’t VIM versus Emax or Mac versus Linux versus Windows. By the time the discussion had cooled off, 630 pages around the web linked to this question. Eventually the bloggers joined in linking to it and posting their own takes. People started to post their opinions in the comments and other people started to disagree. Arguments on the internet, big surprise.īut on this day, June 1st, 2014, a question from user Fredley on the software engineering stack exchange became the number one post on Hacker News. People pouring buckets of ice over themselves to raise money for ALS.īut also in 2014, in my favorite hangout, Hacker News, an argument broke out. Do you remember in 2014? Germany won the world cup and the ice bucket challenge was sweeping Facebook. Hello, this is CoRecursive and I’m Adam Gordon Bell.