Science. 88 produced smaller files than 80. And 90 and above didn’t noticeably shorten files.
Like Raymond Hettinger said in his talk beyond pep8, 90ish is better than a strict 80. If you have 81 characters on a line its a waste of time to move that to three lines and now harder to read. So there should be some buffer. that buffer is 10%. The goal is 80 but we are ok with up to 88.
but no matter what, it's a strict something, right? in Black it's a strict 88 by default (unless it violates some other rule, if I understood the readme)
Like Raymond Hettinger said in his talk beyond pep8, 90ish is better than a strict 80. If you have 81 characters on a line its a waste of time to move that to three lines and now harder to read. So there should be some buffer. that buffer is 10%. The goal is 80 but we are ok with up to 88.