3 ms·

I'm sure you know it's an old design decision that was practical at the time. 100 years from now are we still going to be stuck with 80col's? In your example ma

by jakeogh 11y ago

I'm sure you know it's an old design decision that was practical at the time. 100 years from now are we still going to be stuck with 80col's? In your example making the interface smarter could remove the need to manually resize boxes. I like standards, but 80 chars just isnt enough and never was. Is 96 the next reasonable number?

sago 11y ago
'Stuck with'? I don't think we're stuck with anything. I think 80 cols is a very practical width. Most lines in code that is well structured and simple are less than 80 cols wide. Lines that require more than that can be broken. I think in 20 years of Python I've only seen a couple of cases where there wasn't an obvious semantic break point, most of the time such breaks are easy to place at logical points. When you have 80 cols you have more code in your window. You can use the resolution to have taller windows and more windows side-by-side. 1920 pixels gives you nicely 3x80 col editors. Which allows you to look at the code, and its tests, and the shell at the same time, for example.
- jakeogh 11y ago
  "1920 pixels gives you nicely 3x80 col editors" Depending on your font. I use 1920 (-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1), and I get almost 4x80 col's, 3x96 works nice.
  - sago 11y ago
    Right, I have a pair of 1920s portrait so I can have more drops on my desktop, but on my 17inch MBP, more than 3 drops is too small for my middle-aged eyes. As the commenter above stated, he found considerably less than 1% of his lines required > 80 cols, so rather than go 96 cols and have 17% of my screen real estate wasted, I'll have the extra column of code or documentation or tests, or output, and have to toggle less.
teddyh 11y ago
80 columns was chosen because it fits well with documents produced for old-style fixed-with manual mechanichal typewriter paper. (If you look at the old text files, like the oldest RFC’s, they match this style, and early terminals were made by hooking electric typewriters to computers and supplying a very large spool of paper.) I’ve seen 66 characters recommended as a maximum line width as a style guide for typewritten documents. You also want some extra room for extra margins, line numbering, etc. If 66 is taken as a good minimal number, then 64 (2⁶) is too small, so let’s add, say, 16 to 64, giving 80 columns. Paper documents have the form that they do for a reason. You never saw someone writing sideways on a paper (landscape alignment). This is because readability suffers when lines are too long. Even if boxes resized automatically, it’s the line length that’s the problem, not the resizing or scrolling.

by jakeogh 11y ago

sago 11y ago

'Stuck with'? I don't think we're stuck with anything. I think 80 cols is a very practical width. Most lines in code that is well structured and simple are less than 80 cols wide. Lines that require more than that can be broken. I think in 20 years of Python I've only seen a couple of cases where there wasn't an obvious semantic break point, most of the time such breaks are easy to place at logical points. When you have 80 cols you have more code in your window. You can use the resolution to have taller windows and more windows side-by-side. 1920 pixels gives you nicely 3x80 col editors. Which allows you to look at the code, and its tests, and the shell at the same time, for example.

jakeogh 11y ago
"1920 pixels gives you nicely 3x80 col editors" Depending on your font. I use 1920 (-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1), and I get almost 4x80 col's, 3x96 works nice.
- sago 11y ago
  Right, I have a pair of 1920s portrait so I can have more drops on my desktop, but on my 17inch MBP, more than 3 drops is too small for my middle-aged eyes. As the commenter above stated, he found considerably less than 1% of his lines required > 80 cols, so rather than go 96 cols and have 17% of my screen real estate wasted, I'll have the extra column of code or documentation or tests, or output, and have to toggle less.

teddyh 11y ago

80 columns was chosen because it fits well with documents produced for old-style fixed-with manual mechanichal typewriter paper. (If you look at the old text files, like the oldest RFC’s, they match this style, and early terminals were made by hooking electric typewriters to computers and supplying a very large spool of paper.) I’ve seen 66 characters recommended as a maximum line width as a style guide for typewritten documents. You also want some extra room for extra margins, line numbering, etc. If 66 is taken as a good minimal number, then 64 (2⁶) is too small, so let’s add, say, 16 to 64, giving 80 columns. Paper documents have the form that they do for a reason. You never saw someone writing sideways on a paper (landscape alignment). This is because readability suffers when lines are too long. Even if boxes resized automatically, it’s the line length that’s the problem, not the resizing or scrolling.