The niche for hard-wrapping is straightforward. Sending patches via email. In these types of communities there is no formal markup. So what is code and what

The niche for hard-wrapping is straightforward. Sending patches via email. In these types of communities there is no formal markup. So what is code and what is text? You can’t tell. Some might use “code fence”. Some might use four-space indents. Some might just dump code in between prose. And when you comment on a patch you comment directly on the diff.[1] You can’t just let the email reader go to town on the text. That’s fine for prose but annoying for code where every line break is either intentional or machine formatted. The author mentions the downside of browsing on a mobile device. Yeah I sometimes do that. But the primary mode for this kind of browsing might just be on a laptop/desktop. Certainly if you plan on doing some coding. (not just browsing the email archive for discussions that happened eight years ago... not that I would ever do that) [1] Maybe diffs are easy to parse out of a message since each line starts with `+`, `-` or a space. After you have peeled away the quoting.