4 ms·

This is unironically the true story. Never forget.

jl2718 5y ago
I forgot the 80-character limit. Because of word-wrap, and the tendency for editors like notepad to save the newlines it adds, the 80-character limit came into fashion. People that write long chains of functional code also like tabs. This forced them into deep nested calls with lots of tabs, and the tab display width changed from 8 to 4, sometimes 2. There was good reason for this. In C/C++, you had to declare every variable at the top of every function so that the compiler could allocate space for it on the stack. This was inefficient, hard to get right with the types, and ugly to read, but it was the way that people were taught in school, and the other intent of the 80-character limit was to force homegrown coders to do it like everybody else. Tabs of course wreaked havok upon these linters. Wars erupted over how many characters a tab should be. The internal divisions between old-school 8-space tabbers and the new hip 2-space tabbers made surrender to 4-spacers seem a little more like compromise rather than death of principles. 80 characters? Seriously? My template type declarations are greater than 80 characters. This of course gave rise to the huge cultural phenomenon known as “wrap music”, which is composed by independent cubicle artists producing either ‘scratches’ using the scroll wheel ratchet on their mouse, or the loud unstoppable succession of system beeps that you get by holding the down arrow until your laggy system finally gets to the bottom of a text file.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Because of word-wrap, and the tendency for editors like notepad to save the newlines it adds, the 80-character limit came into fashion. Uh... No, absolutely not. What are you imagining, that this newfangled Windows Notepad is ancient history or something? Sheesh, kids nowadays, geroffmylawn etc. The 80-character limit comes from old terminals (and the text mode of at least CGA, possibly even EGA, PC monitors) and, ultimately, punch cards.
  - jl2718 5y ago
    You are definitely right about this. I was thinking more of who it was enforced upon and how things got messed up with respect to the difference between tabs and spaces. I remember opening things in a terminal and it was relatively clean, maybe a few wrapped lines, and then editing in notepad, and then it looked like trash when opened in the terminal because newlines were all put in some arbitrary width. My perspective mostly comes from MSDN shops I interned with in the 90s, so the terminal (DOS) was mostly a printf debugger, scripting environment, gaming console, and BBS gateway. I installed zipslack once, and had no idea what to do with it. Forgive me for being a L4m3r (still actually).

I forgot the 80-character limit. Because of word-wrap, and the tendency for editors like notepad to save the newlines it adds, the 80-character limit came into fashion. People that write long chains of functional code also like tabs. This forced them into deep nested calls with lots of tabs, and the tab display width changed from 8 to 4, sometimes 2. There was good reason for this. In C/C++, you had to declare every variable at the top of every function so that the compiler could allocate space for it on the stack. This was inefficient, hard to get right with the types, and ugly to read, but it was the way that people were taught in school, and the other intent of the 80-character limit was to force homegrown coders to do it like everybody else. Tabs of course wreaked havok upon these linters. Wars erupted over how many characters a tab should be. The internal divisions between old-school 8-space tabbers and the new hip 2-space tabbers made surrender to 4-spacers seem a little more like compromise rather than death of principles. 80 characters? Seriously? My template type declarations are greater than 80 characters. This of course gave rise to the huge cultural phenomenon known as “wrap music”, which is composed by independent cubicle artists producing either ‘scratches’ using the scroll wheel ratchet on their mouse, or the loud unstoppable succession of system beeps that you get by holding the down arrow until your laggy system finally gets to the bottom of a text file.

CRConrad 5y ago
> Because of word-wrap, and the tendency for editors like notepad to save the newlines it adds, the 80-character limit came into fashion. Uh... No, absolutely not. What are you imagining, that this newfangled Windows Notepad is ancient history or something? Sheesh, kids nowadays, geroffmylawn etc. The 80-character limit comes from old terminals (and the text mode of at least CGA, possibly even EGA, PC monitors) and, ultimately, punch cards.
- jl2718 5y ago
  You are definitely right about this. I was thinking more of who it was enforced upon and how things got messed up with respect to the difference between tabs and spaces. I remember opening things in a terminal and it was relatively clean, maybe a few wrapped lines, and then editing in notepad, and then it looked like trash when opened in the terminal because newlines were all put in some arbitrary width. My perspective mostly comes from MSDN shops I interned with in the 90s, so the terminal (DOS) was mostly a printf debugger, scripting environment, gaming console, and BBS gateway. I installed zipslack once, and had no idea what to do with it. Forgive me for being a L4m3r (still actually).