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Exploring Line Lengths in Python Packages | Pythonic Perambulations

jakevdp.github.io · 3,026 words · saved by 1 readers

This week, Twitter upped their single-tweet character limit from 140 to 280, purportedly based on this interesting analysis of tweet lengths published on Twitter's engineering blog. The gist of the analysis is this: English language tweets display a roughly log-normal distribution of character counts, except near the 140-character limit, at which the distribution spikes: The analysis takes this as evidence that twitter users often "cram" their longer thoughts into the 140 character limit, and suggest that a 280-character limit would more naturally accommodate the distribution of people's desired tweet lengths. This immediately brought to mind another character limit that many Python programmers face in their day-to-day lives: the 79-character line limit suggested by Python's PEP8 style guide: Limit all lines to a maximum of 79 characters. I began to wonder whether popular Python packages (e.g. NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, Scikit-Learn, Matplotlib, AstroPy) display anything similar to what is

This week, Twitter upped their single-tweet character limit from 140 to 280, purportedly based on this interesting analysis of tweet lengths published on Twitter's engineering blog. The gist of the analysis is this: English language tweets display a roughly log-normal distribution of character counts, except near the 140-character limit, at which the distribution spikes: The analysis takes this as evidence that twitter users often "cram" their longer thoughts into the 140 character limit, and suggest that a 280-character limit would more naturally accommodate the distribution of people's desir

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