&gt; My feeling though is the problem is they have a line limit.<p>There are a few reasons why we do 80 columns:<p>1. <i>Human eyes</i> have an effective line limit. The longer a line gets, the harder it is to scan back to the beginning of the next line. This is why paperbacks are taller than they are wide and why newspapers use several short columns instead of one wide one.<p>2. Being too narrow hurts readability, sure, but being too wide does as well. Also, even though many developers have giant monitors now, we also spend a lot of time on laptops, doing side-by-side code reviews, looking at code on blogs, etc. 80 columns is pretty friendly towards all of the various and sundry places where a user may be looking at some code.<p>3. We found it encourages better code. Dart is syntactically kind of a superset of Java, which means you <i>can</i> write Dart code that looks like Java. In particular, you can revisit some of the egregiously verbose naming practices that infected that community in the 90s. I see a lot of code like:<p><pre><code>    LoggedInUserPreferenceManager preferences = new LoggedInUserPreferenceManager();
</code></pre>
A shorter column limit has worked as an effective nudge to get people to do:<p><pre><code>    var preferences = new Preferences();
</code></pre>
&gt; The article just pointed out a year of wasted time.<p>We&#x27;ll get the time back. It&#x27;s amortized over the amount of time saved by running it x the number of engineers using it.<p>&gt; 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.<p>The problem here is that you had to <i>manually</i> reformat it! Refactoring is a key goal of automated formatting. You can make a sweeping change to the length of an identifier and automatically fix the formatting every where it appears.<p>&gt; I also had code generators at google that had to generate code that followed the line limit.<p>Code generators are another explicit use case. We have a lot of code generators now that produce completely unformatted code and the run dartfmt on it.<p>&gt; I too wasted days futsing with the generator to break the lines at the correct places all because of some arbitrary line limit.<p>Should have used an automated formatter.