&gt; What screen size? What resolution? What ide&#x2F;editor window size? What font face &amp; size? With or without soft line wrapping?<p>Does it matter? There will be a point at which an extra line makes the difference. And particularly with modern screen shapes, vertical space is at much more of a premium than horizontal space.<p>&gt; Honestly arguments about how &quot;pretty&quot; code is are fucking ridiculous. Despite what someone said, the purpose of source code is not to be &quot;read&quot; with &quot;running&quot; as a secondary task. That literally only applies to code written purely for educational purposes.
&gt; The purpose of code is to achieve the goals of the software as efficiently as possible. Efficiency is not just about speed - a fast but unreliable program is not efficient.<p>The ability to understand software is vital to real-world usefulness though. Requirements change all the time, and so the ability to make changes to software is vital - and to effect desired changes to code you must first understand it.