80 Column Lines in Objective-C

Objective C’s Verbosity

I enjoy the verbosity of Objective-C; those long method names and variable are fun to read (and fun to write with auto-completion turned on). Recently, I accepted that fact that some people like to limit code to 120 characters (or even 80 characters). Code lines this short are predictable at small window sizes, a big advantage in small terminal windows. Even though I’m writing code in XCode on a 27” iMac, I thought I’d give this a try.

80 column vs infinity

Mashed Potatoes

It turns out that Objective-C formatted this way starts to look like an unreadable pile of mash. What I immediately noticed is that I rely upon the long method definitions to break apart my code. Using a line limit makes it harder to distinguish sections that previously were quite pronounced.

I’ll admit I was a little disappointed to go back to long lines, so I decided to do some investigating. I thought, “Lets see what any famous open-source project does in their code.” Moments later, I was on the Chameleon GitHub page and to my utter surprise—the code style had no line limit at all.

I hit up @BigZaphod (the primary author of the Chameleon project) on Twitter to see what he had to say about code formatting:

@bentford No one has ever mentioned it. :) My limit is basically “size of my window” but it doesn’t really bother me much.
— Sean Heber (@BigZaphod) January 24, 2013

Conclusion

I’m happy to report that I went back to my old style. I’ve changed it up a bit and try to keep long code lines to a minimum. In Objective-C, it makes sense to let those long lines be.

It’s a nice feeling to gain confidence in a decision you’re not sure about simply by asking a respected peer.