I wonder if this might cause more problems in this day and age. Remember that in C (and possibly other languages) there are rules for how long a function name can be. Therefore, you often see very hard-to-understand names in C code. The good thing is that they don't use a lot of space. But every time I look at code in some language like C# or Java the method names are often very long, which makes it close to impossible to keep your code at a 80 characters length. I don't think 80 characters are valid today, unless you need to be able to print the code, etc.
