On Monday, August 25, 2014 9:17:33 AM UTC-5, Michael DeHaan wrote:

My feeling is, in this day of widescreen monitors and laptops, there's 
> plenty of room in nearly all cases, and 79 character line wrap is obsolete.
>
> Making more concise playbooks makes them easier to read and skim, rather 
> than things being several pages long.
>
> I do believe in significant use of whitespace between lines, giving every 
> task a "name:" attribute, and things like that.
>

There's plenty of room for argument there, though... I work primarily on an 
11 MacBook Air and a 9.7" iPad. At my desk, I will hook the Air up to a 24" 
monitor, but I still have 3-5 windows on the display, and like being able 
to stack at least two windows side-by-side, meaning I get a max of maybe 
120 characters comfortably.

There's that (anecdotal evidence, of course), and the fact that most 
languages discourage placing multiple statements on one line (Python's own PEP 
8 style guide <http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/> states "*Compound 
statements (multiple statements on the same line) are generally 
discouraged.*", the Linux kernel coding style prohibits it 
<https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle>, ).

There are other <http://stackoverflow.com/a/18525577/100134> good 
<http://benalman.com/news/2012/05/multiple-var-statements-javascript/> 
reasons, too:


   - Easier to read, and less chance that future you/other developer would 
   glance over an important variable when debugging.
   - Better for VCS, since each line diff is highlighted (and better 
   support in diffing software for line-by-line diff than intra-line diff 
   highlighting).
   - Less error-prone, and easier to maintain (need to nix a param just 
   dd/Ctrl-K the line and that param is gone).

This argument is more philosophical than practical in some ways, but in my 
experience, splitting things to multiple lines and breaking up task lists 
into short playbooks (usually < 100 lines per playbook) makes it easier for 
me to jump back into something I haven't touched in months and debug/rework 
it, and for me to be able to see differences more easily in GitHub PRs.

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