I can only agree with this if the lint rules are paired with 100% automatic reformatting, and not simply a lint rule that rejects the changes. It's a huge waste of time to force the author to go back and manually fix line lengths to meet someone's arbitrary preference for how long a line should be. Line length is clearly a preference and forcing everyone to conform to a single standard doesn't solve legibility.
The language should make line breaking obvious or automatic. IMO, The fact that it's an issue at all seems like a weakness in Python's syntax. Compared to the languages dominated by curly braces and the lisps with their parenthesis. Python saves my pinky fingers from typing braces and parenthesis but it demands more attention to the placement of line-breaks. Combine that with very short line-length standards and it leads to significant annoyance.
Python is a shit show, absolutely. However, all you have to do to get around things like arbitrary line lengths making code objectively worse is to either, 1) increase the line length something more reasonable/modern, like 100 or even 120, or, 2) agree as an organization which lint rules to disable as part of your org's official "style guide".
> Line length is clearly a preference and forcing everyone to conform to a single standard doesn't solve legibility.
I fully disagree here. Enforcing 80 characters is way too short for any reasonably complex code and leads to exactly the issue you're complaining about: tools doing automatic line breaking which make the code worse, AND/OR developers making their code more golfy in order to fit inside the line length limit whenever possible.
What you're arguing for (individual developers taking responsibility for their own line breaking style) would only work if every developer cared about such things, and now you have business/product complaining to project managers about how much time we're wasting formatting our own code by hand instead of letting automation remove that variable from the equation.
Again, all of these opinions are with the perspective of working with dozens of developers on a very large and complex codebase. If I personally disagree with somebody's "style" for line breaking, and I happen to find myself working in their code, what am I supposed to do if I personally find their code more difficult to read? Do I do re-work to make the format align with how I best read code? What happens when the original author comes back?
Developer ego is a huge problem. Automated formatting and linting help to reduce that problem.
EDIT: I was actually responding more to arp242... whoops
> Enforcing 80 characters is way too short for any reasonably complex code
Making it a hard requirement is a bad idea, making it 'required unless you can give a really good reason' (and notice that arp242 made clear that lengthening some lines a bit was a perfectly reasonable thing to do) is usually* workable.
My usual coding style tends to fairly naturally fit into 80 columns, -especially- in the case of complex code because that tends to get broken up vertically for clarity, and an '80 columns unless you have a good reason' limit seems to work out fine for e.g. PostgreSQL whose source code I personally find -extremely- readable.
I do agree that a lot of the time having some sort of autoformatter that everybody runs is a net win, especially since with a little practice you can usually predict what the autoformatter is going to do and code such that the output is decently clear to read as well as consistent with the rest of the codebase.
(*) Enterprise java style codebases where every identifier name is a miniature essay less so.
I can only agree with this if the lint rules are paired with 100% automatic reformatting, and not simply a lint rule that rejects the changes. It's a huge waste of time to force the author to go back and manually fix line lengths to meet someone's arbitrary preference for how long a line should be. Line length is clearly a preference and forcing everyone to conform to a single standard doesn't solve legibility.
The language should make line breaking obvious or automatic. IMO, The fact that it's an issue at all seems like a weakness in Python's syntax. Compared to the languages dominated by curly braces and the lisps with their parenthesis. Python saves my pinky fingers from typing braces and parenthesis but it demands more attention to the placement of line-breaks. Combine that with very short line-length standards and it leads to significant annoyance.