I am an 80 column purist
First of all let me start by saying that all my lash language is tongue-in-cheek. If you need a visual, you can imagine me poking you in the ribs at the bar and having a laugh. I have nothing but respect for Daniel and his work.<p>That said:<p>* Narrower is easier to read<p>Yes, for prose. And no one actually said easier, they said faster. Code is typically full of parenthesis special notations and characters. Nobody&#x27;s speed-reading code. That doesn&#x27;t make sense.<p>* Side-by-side works better<p>Marginally. Most code is pretty succinct anyway and you can easily compare it side to side. In real life, this is almost never a problem.<p>* Better diffs<p>Don&#x27;t conform your code to fit your tools. Use tools that fit your code. There&#x27;s plenty of good diffing tools and git clients and editor plugins that make this a breeze.<p>* It encourages shorter names<p>Arguably an anti-patern.<p>&gt;    I know especially Java people object to this as they’re trained in a different culture and say that a method name should rather include a lot of details of the functionality “to help the user”, but to me that’s a weak argument as all non-trivial functions will have more functionality than what can be expressed in the name and thus the user needs to know how the function works anyway.<p>You shouldn&#x27;t have to read a lot of code to understand it and locate problems and botlenecks. If your code requires grokking and keeping vast amounts of methods in your head you&#x27;re wasting valuable cognitive load<p>* Just a few spaces per indent level<p>ok, so I like this. =)<p>* Many indent levels is wrong anyway<p>Absolutely. Make methods and give them proper names. Go Daniel!<p>* Why exactly 80?<p>.. technically not a part of the argument, but I&#x27;m glad it&#x27;s here. 80, 100, 120, 160, 200? It doesn&#x27;t matter. Either full freedom to express myself to the best of my abilities or it doesn&#x27;t matter.<p>* Enforced by a tool<p>The root of all evil. A tool for stripping away context and making hackily written code under pressue and time limitations and carefully planned out code look the same to the naked eye.