The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card • Hacker News Board

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#21

Post by s_kilk » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 2:47 PM UTC

strictnein wrote: post #17

benbenolson wrote: post #5

I don't doubt that the author's story is correct, but I think that 80 is a perfectly reasonable number to have as a standard. It's very annoying when I read code that doesn't use the 80-character limit, because my terminal is not guaranteed to be as wide as theirs, and I really don't like resizing my terminal window to fit their line length. For car width, I think that that's also a pretty reasonable width, since it'…

80 characters seems really narrow. IDEs like IntelliJ put a guideline at 120 characters, which basically allows two full width editing windows side by side (depending on your font size) at the pretty standard resolution of 1920x1080. We've all got widescreen monitors now, right? So it makes sense that people are going well past 80 characters.

> We've all got widescreen monitors now, right?

Sure we do, but some/many of those widescreen monitors are only eleven or thirteen inches diagonally, and can't reasonably fit two buffers of text 120-chars wide without shrinking the font to eye-straining sizes (yes, even on retina screens).

Plus, this only gets worse as you get older and your eyesight starts to diminish.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#22

Post by tremon » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 2:51 PM UTC

strictnein wrote: post #17

benbenolson wrote: post #5

I don't doubt that the author's story is correct, but I think that 80 is a perfectly reasonable number to have as a standard. It's very annoying when I read code that doesn't use the 80-character limit, because my terminal is not guaranteed to be as wide as theirs, and I really don't like resizing my terminal window to fit their line length. For car width, I think that that's also a pretty reasonable width, since it'…

80 characters seems really narrow. IDEs like IntelliJ put a guideline at 120 characters, which basically allows two full width editing windows side by side (depending on your font size) at the pretty standard resolution of 1920x1080. We've all got widescreen monitors now, right? So it makes sense that people are going well past 80 characters.

As another commenter noted, it's not (just) about screen width. It's about having a text width that allows your eyes to track both column boundaries as achoring points. If a text is too wide, your eyes will have trouble finding the start of the next line.

For the same reason, newspapers use multiple columns, even though the paper itself would allow for 200-character lines.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#23

Post by tamana » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 2:52 PM UTC

strictnein wrote: post #17

benbenolson wrote: post #5

I don't doubt that the author's story is correct, but I think that 80 is a perfectly reasonable number to have as a standard. It's very annoying when I read code that doesn't use the 80-character limit, because my terminal is not guaranteed to be as wide as theirs, and I really don't like resizing my terminal window to fit their line length. For car width, I think that that's also a pretty reasonable width, since it'…

80 characters seems really narrow. IDEs like IntelliJ put a guideline at 120 characters, which basically allows two full width editing windows side by side (depending on your font size) at the pretty standard resolution of 1920x1080. We've all got widescreen monitors now, right? So it makes sense that people are going well past 80 characters.

80col is narrow for Java because Java has very long method names, explicit tyle declarations, and class names on static methods.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#24

Post by dilap » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 2:52 PM UTC

emacs, submlime, xcode can soft wrap code well (indenting a little extra on the wrap). wrap for semantics, not any arbitrary boundary, and then you can view the code perfectly across many different resolutions & window configurations (2-up, 3-up, whatever).

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#25

Post by tamana » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 2:53 PM UTC

OneOneOneOne wrote: post #12

patrickmay wrote: post #2

50-75 characters is the optimal line width for the human eye to scan: http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

For code it also seems most of the text reside on the left. Opening an extra wide window to display text for the occasional long line seems a waste of screen space.

That's why your editor has soft line break capability.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#26

Post by theophrastus » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

Someone already knows the answer to this, (but not me): if you examine a statistically representative set of ancient books, (both pre- and post- Gutenberg) what is the average line length? And doesn't that partially depend on "standard" parchment/vellum size? And doesn't that depend on the size of a young sheep's belly? ("The tyranny of the size of sheep!" Where's James Burke when you need him?)

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#27

Post by pohl » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 2:56 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #11

The banana/monkey story is not actually true, it was not tested as described, and a somewhat similar test did not have clear results. http://www.throwcase.com/2014/12/21/that-five-monkeys-and-a-...

I like the Ricky Gervais bathtub selfie in that article.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#28

Post by jdblair » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 2:56 PM UTC

Interesting fact: the Hollerith punched card is the same size as the dollar bill in 1890. This is because Hollerith was able to take advantage of existing stacking and sorting equipment already designed for banks.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/...

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#29

Post by arethuza » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 2:57 PM UTC

s_kilk wrote: post #19

benbenolson wrote: post #5

I don't doubt that the author's story is correct, but I think that 80 is a perfectly reasonable number to have as a standard. It's very annoying when I read code that doesn't use the 80-character limit, because my terminal is not guaranteed to be as wide as theirs, and I really don't like resizing my terminal window to fit their line length. For car width, I think that that's also a pretty reasonable width, since it'…

Agreed, 80-chars may be an accident of history, but it's an accident which happens to line up quite well with the human eyes ability to track horizontal lines of text. It gets tiring listening to devs rage about the 80-char limit, then go on to produce code that's basically unreadable because it scrolls way off the screen.

I was looking at some C code of mine that is ~30 years old - it was written on 80x24 serial terminal in vi and I was fairly pleased with how readable my code was. I suspect a large part of that was the short line lengths!

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#30

Post by knodi123 » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 2:59 PM UTC

gremy0 wrote: post #18

benbenolson wrote: post #5

I don't doubt that the author's story is correct, but I think that 80 is a perfectly reasonable number to have as a standard. It's very annoying when I read code that doesn't use the 80-character limit, because my terminal is not guaranteed to be as wide as theirs, and I really don't like resizing my terminal window to fit their line length. For car width, I think that that's also a pretty reasonable width, since it'…

> For car width, I think that that's also a pretty reasonable width, since it's the perfect width to fit two people side-by-side comfortably, with a bit of room in the middle. How do you know the width of a standard human isn't determined by 2000 years of people choosing partners that would fit beside them on a cart comfortably.

oh my god, you just uncovered the cause of the obesity epidemic in america- the spread of SUVs and wide multi-lane highways