Seriously, limiting your programming for a lifetime to 80 columns because you couldn't figure out how to make some grotty old dot matrix printer do 8-point printing a decade ago really isn't all that smart, is it?
No, but I still find 80 columns to be a reasonable limit. The average person can comfortably track up to about 65 characters on a line in prose (or so I've been told from a study that was related to me from a forgotten source...). Given that there's more whitespace in code, it's probably a bit more.
The 80 column limit can also encourage developers to keep their functions smaller and factor out common code. (I say can, because I've seen the six-levels-of-indentation-loops sadly all too often...)
I'm still disappointed at programming editors that can't make sense of normal typefaces and have to be used with monospaced fonts.
I've tried it, mainly to see what it looks like. Unfortunately, the delimiters that have a great deal of meaning in many languages (parens, braces, brackets, single quotes, etc.) end up being far too small for my eyes.
For some reason, though, I've seen a lot of VHDL code typeset in books in proportional fonts, though usually with boldface highlighting of reserved words.
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