Yes, I find it harder to read code at lengths much longer than this. 120 is quite difficult. It also makes it even harder to read if you split the screen vertically, which I do all the time.

That said, I don’t think it should be a hard limit and it’s fine if a lines a bit over, +/- 10 like you said. Certainly not something that we should contort into multiple lines just to keep under a hard limit. Unfortunately, a few auto formatters only do hard limits - it’d be interesting to see how an acceptable interval around the limit would work.

Plus, I’ve noticed the limit makes more of a difference for comments than code so I try to keep comments under that. The written word appears more sensitive to line length.

For my personal Python projects I set a hard limit in the 94-96 range. That's wide enough that I actualy adhere to it instead of just ignoring it.

PEP8's and Google style guide's limits of 79 and 80 are way to narrow for a language with 4 space identation. However PEP says that "it is okay to increase the line length limit up to 99 characters" while Google's 80 is just a soft limit that can be broken in certain cases like long URLs.

How do you envision an interval around a limit? The fact is that you have to draw the line somewhere. If your interval is +-20, then setting a "limit" of 80 is really just a hard limit of 100.

By letting the code formatter exceed the limit if it allows for more readable formatting in certain cases. Going for a 100% hard limit means sometimes it'll shuffle chunks of code around because of 1-2 characters and that just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Or in other words, by formatting the code more like a human than dumping the source tree with a blind set of rules. If Copilot is possible then so is an AI model able to consider how code actually looks on the screen.

How do you quantify the tipping point where a longer but continuous line is prettier than a broken line? (broken where?)

They already answered the question: you use statistical methods (aka AI).

I didn’t know this until I read it. Whenever I listened to Ghosts, I’ve hit a few tracks and thought “I’m sure this was on The Social Network”. And then some time later, I’ve done the same thing listening to TSN OST. Never clicked!

I really loved the soundtrack when watching this film. I was thinking this is some of the best New Age music I’ve ever heard. And, to my complete surprise, it was scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. NIN has been my all time favourite band since I was a kid. That made me chuckle.

Indeed, it’s hard to read about naughty Orcas and Postgres internals on a single feed, despite both being inherently interesting to me. It’s a refreshing change from the Reddit homepage, with topics I have to piece together myself.

Fact is, I can’t fully predict what I will find interesting so HN regularly offers me a good few dark horses that Reddit simply cannot.

Not long ago, there was a series on the history of bread. I’m sure there’s some kind of subreddit for this but I’d never have sought it out.

Let’s hope they don’t start eating tide pods.

Oh no, the pods leave when the tide comes in.

I believe the chat backend was implemented in Erlang too. When I was much younger, the web based instant messaging seemed like magic to me so I looked into it and turned out they used Erlang.

Me too! I was, shamefully, in the middle of work so had a mini panic thinking my 5 min HN scroll was gonna become an hour long battle with my connection!

One of the quotes seems to mention to that, where he says he digests a lot of papers to add a small part to TAoCP, since his aim is to write books that cover a the breadth of computer science (which necessarily cannot be as deep as these papers go).

Interesting. The cheesecake here is nothing like ones found in the UK, which would be classified as toast!

This was my experience too :) Was a bit more promiscuous with where I helped out, including UN, Graal Kingdoms and Zone, but also spent a lot of time building my own playerworlds.

I owe my career to that game!