| Practice 28 | Tall Beats Wide |
You youngsters have it easy. When I were a lad, we celebrated the switch from paper-roll teletypes to video terminals. Our screens were 80 characters wide (the number of columns on a punch card) and 24 lines high, green on black. And we loved it.
Now y’all have 56-inch 8K displays with pixels the size of atoms and a built-in coffee maker.
The trouble is some folks open an editor full screen and type code until it hits the right edge of the screen—200 characters, 300 characters, whatever fits.
Reading this code is a nightmare. Many studies have shown that the optimum line length when reading is between 45 to 75 characters. Much longer and your eye can get lost, forcing you to rescan the line from the beginning. And ...
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