adam bien's blog

The Enterprise Line Is Too Short 📎

Sun's / Oracle's programming style guide as well as the JavaRanch and many corporate "enterprise" style guides limit the line width in an editor. 80 characters are still a popular setting.

All IDEs can be configured to honor the settings, but too short line width usually leads to awful looking code.

Even worse. Developers are tempted to use cryptic naming conventions to conform with short line width, what negatively impacts the maintainability.

The explanation of the limitations are sometimes funny. Usually such conventions are explained with printability. The real reason are typewriters ...from 1961.

See you at Java EE Workshops at MUC Airport!