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80 seems to be the default in many different environments and I'm looking for a technical or historical reason. It is common knowledge that lines of code shouldn't exceed 80 characters, but I'm hard pressed to find a reason why outside of "some people might get annoyed."
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You would write your program out in long hand, in paper, and then you would punch it into the cards. And so if you went over 80 characters, you were dead. There was no more lines on the punch-cards.
Lines that are 80 characters long may cause wrapping when the file is dumped to an 80 column terminal unless the terminal is set to truncate long lines. In some terminals, under some configuration, when a character is printed in the 80th position, the cursor then advances to the start of the next line.
IDEA-260785 Integrated Terminal not handling shell features well. IDEA-261136 builtin terminal shows multiple issues with zsh npm-check, etc. WI-58435 Terminal seems to think it is at default size 80x24, completely broken and unusable.
Many terminals allow configuration of a default size. The “normal” size for a terminal is 80 columns by 24 rows. These dimensions were inherited from the size of common hardware terminals, which, in turn, were influenced by the format of IBM punch cards (80 columns by 12 rows).
As per Wikipedia:
80 chars per line is historically descended from punched cards and later broadly used in monitor text mode
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_per_line
Shall I still use 80 CPL?
Many developers argue to use 80 CPL even if you could use more. Quoting from: http://richarddingwall.name/2008/05/31/is-the-80-character-line-limit-still-relevant/
Long lines that span too far across the monitor are hard to read. This is typography 101. The shorter your line lengths, the less your eye has to travel to see it.
If your code is narrow enough, you can fit two files on screen, side by side, at the same time. This can be very useful if you’re comparing files, or watching your application run side-by-side with a debugger in real time.
Plus, if you write code 80 columns wide, you can relax knowing that your code will be readable and maintainable on more-or-less any computer in the world.
Another nice side effect is that snippets of narrow code are much easier to embed into documents or blog posts.
As a Vim user, I keep ColorColumn=80 in my ~/.vimrc. If I remember correctly, Eclipse autoformat CtrlShiftF, breaks lines at 80 chars by default.
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It is because IBM punch cards were 80 characters wide.
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