59 years ago, I took a touch typing class in 10th grade, because I thought it would help in writing college papers. But that experience proved extremely handy when I was introduced to computers in college. IBM keypunch machines were the bomb :-) Programming is all about words, whether made up variable names, or language reserved words, and this is VERY IMPORTANT, “Comments”. If you struggle to write code, because you are slow at the keyboard, then you are less likely to explain what your code is doing via comments. Writing code professionally, means maintaining someone else’s code, as well as writing new code that someone else will eventually maintain, and if no one provided any comments, it can take a long time to figure out what any given section of code is trying to accomplish in the bigger scope of the program. Besides, if you can touch type, you are more likely to keep up with your brain, and not have important bits of code in your head not make it into file you are editing.

3 to 6 Sci-Fi and Fantasy per month, depending on available time, size of book, and if I "Just cannot put it down" kind of book. No, my reading habits have not really changed since the 7th grade when I discovered Robert A. Heinlein, and "The Red Planet" (50+ years of reading)

A long easy to remember and enter password beats a short complex password that requires finger gymnastics. As others have pointed out, the XKCD comic says it all https://xkcd.com/936/ Also look at https://www.grc.com/haystack.h... Now if you are always going to use a password manager to enter the password for you, then long and complex is the best of both worlds, as long as you do not personally need to do the finger gymnastics of entering the long complex password. And if using a password manager, make the access to the password manager a long easy to remember and enter password, as that is the one you will be typing a lot.

In 1970, during one of my 6-month College Co-op assignments, I took an IBM FORTRAN Self-Paced Study course. When I got back to school, I took more programming courses, including ones that taught different forms of computer math (1's complement, 2's complement, excess-3, BCD), assembly language on a fake computer simulator, PDP-8 assembly, PDP-8 FOCAL, APL, more FORTRAN (it was an engineering school after all and FORTRAN was the language of choice for engineering in those days), etc... And because I ran out of programming courses, I took all the computer hardware courses the EE department offered, including an Analog computer course. And my next Co-op assignment was in the company's programming department. During my senior year I started working part time for a computer manufacturer, writing 80 column card reader/punch hardware diagnostics, running on bare metal (no operating system; your program booted and ran totally self contained). All languages after that were on the job, leaning as you go.

Virgin Mobile USA has a $35/month "Beyond Talk" plan ($30 if you provide a credit card) with unlimited text & data, plus 300 talk minutes per month. There is no contract. Virgin Mobile USA is the Sprint Pay-as-You-Go division (Sprint obtained Virgin Mobile USA from Richard Branson's Virgin company a few years ago).

Side by Side differences utilities (sdiff, vimdiff, gvimdiff, etc...) can show two 80 column wide windows without having part of the line truncated, or requiring left/right scrolling (assumes a large 1280x1024 monitor). Lines which are longer than 80 columns make it more difficult to review code changes (think of your code reviewer), and for other developers to maintain the code.

Not everyone has a 20+ inch monitor available to view long lines of source code, and some of those that do, still like to use 80 column windows. Also keep in mind that at home, some developers have small monitors attached to their home PCs or use laptops, and the only way to view long lines is to use tiny fonts that become difficult to read (especially if you are already wearing trifocals; remember some day you will be the one with trifocals!).

Lines which are longer than 80 columns makes it difficult to print source listings and get clean neat readable hardcopy. Yes it may be possible to get the printer to use a smaller font, but then we are back to poor eyesight issues.

windbg and other GUI debuggers can have multiple panes of debugging information displayed, but if your source pane is too wide it limits the amount of really useful debugging information you can have concurrently displayed.

Sometimes lines longer than 80 columns cannot be helped (like a table), but if they can be avoided by restructuring, or breaking the line into multiple lines and still maintain readability, it would be preferred.

Those are my reasons for preferring 80 column or less lines.

And as others have pointed out, 80 columns originated with punched cards.

Bob Harris