For the first seven or so years of my career I was a Fortran programmer so I was used to a 72 character limit so moving to 80 characters seemed like a luxury. I still try to keep code lines under 80 characters as it avoids problems with line wrapping and, to my eye, is neater and easier to read. I try where possible to set tools up with a longer default line length but still limit my code to less than 80. I'm also an advocate of plenty of white space and will write my $var = $hash{ key }->[ $sub ]; rather than my $var=$hash{key}->[$sub];. Again, it is easier to see what is going on, at least to my old eyes.