While I agree that not having a line take up hundreds of characters is a good thing, 80 is really arbitrary in 2013 and having any self-imposed hard limit is silly. When you put a single 4- or 5-character word on a new line because you don't want to go over 80 (or 120 or whatever), the code is /less/ readable. A better guideline is to make new lines as necessary to make things more readable rather than blindly stick to some hard limit and say it's more readable just because.
Also, IMO, 80 is far too limiting and I find 120-130 much better. Then again, I like small font sizes and avoid lower resolution screens like the plague. -- CPython 3.3.0 | Windows NT 6.2.9200 / FreeBSD 9.1 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
