Comment by 082349872349872

I worked on a Java codebase a while ago that had identifiers which were longer than 80 characters. Perfectly fine in our era of huge display bandwidth, but once upon a time, those identifiers would not have fit on a full-width display without wrapping; at an even earlier time one would have waited a noticeable amount of time for them to print out on a TTY.

(and an earlier HN thread suggested that even in our era, those with vision problems who bump display magnification may not appreciate 80-character idents)