Lines/screen and characters/line¶

Sean McGrath writes about a correlation between screen size and method length

Funny, I never thought about the number of lines on the screen, only about number of characters on one line.

I'm normally limiting myself to some 70-80 characters max, which limits your amount of indentation. After three if or for statements, the space starts getting narrow. This pushes you to splitting things up a bit into different methods.

Thinking about his lines/screen ratio... Dunno. When one single method starts getting past a page or two, I normally split it to make it a bit more browseable. A few more lines on your screen extra probably delays this for a bit, but that only effects methods with, say, 30-50 lines, not the 30- or 50+ ones.

Characters/line has much more effect. I'm refactoring/reformatting some existing code that happily puts 150 characters on one line. Ouch. To counter it, I have to introduce more variables and some additional methods. The amount of code goes up, but it's much clearer in my opinion. Instead of calling a method and doing all sorts of calculations in-place for parameters... :

 # before
 method1('test', len(self.something.objectIds()), self.somewhere.pipe)
 # after
 amountOfContent = len(self.something.objectIds())
 outputPipe = self.somewhere.pipe
 method1('test', amountOfContent, outputPipe)

Might be personal preference, though :-)