I'm not a huge fan if strict line limits. But in general you are better off keeping your lines shorter. There are many reasons, shorter lines are easier to read. Some programming lines are naturally short. Switching between long and short lines can be difficult. But the biggest reason, many tools work better with shorter lines. Diffs, commit histories and so on. I don't know how many times the delta was in code that was off the screen and the tool didn't have a slider (or maybe it did, but sliding back and forth was painful) Generally shorter lines are better than longer ones.