The Hardest Program I've Ever Written
Great blog post and super interesting.<p>My feeling though is the problem is they have a line limit. Maybe they should rethink their style. I'm serious.<p>Before I worked at Google, in 30 years of programming I never worked at a company that had a line limit. Adding a line limit at Google did not make me more productive. At first I thought "hey, I guess 80 chars makes side by side comparison easier" but then I thought back, hmm. I never had problems comparing code before when I didn't have a line limit.<p>Instead what I found was that 80 character limit was a giant waste of time. The article just pointed out a year of wasted time. I can point to searching and replacing an identifier and then having to go manually reformat hundreds of lines of code all because of some arbitrary style guide. I also had code generators at google that had to generate code that followed the line limit. I too wasted days futsing with the generator to break the lines at the correct places all because of some arbitrary line limit.<p>That should be the real takeaway here. Make sure each rule of your style guide actually serves a purpose or that its supposed benefits outway its costs.