Similar story about the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split in UNIX : http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...
The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
31–40 of 148 posts
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#32The article has the causality backwards. We don't use 80 characters because that's what the Hollerith card used, the Hollerith card used 80 characters because that's a good ergonomic width. (Or, if you prefer, the Hollerith card succeeded because it was a good ergonomic width.) Coincidentally (or perhaps ironically) the article itself is formatted for ~80 characters per line, not because it's bound by the Hollerith c…
> Coincidentally (or perhaps ironically) the article itself is formatted for ~80 characters per line,
Maybe because it was written from a terminal?
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#3350-75 characters is the optimal line width for the human eye to scan: http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
First, we are not reading text but code.
Second, we code very differently then we used to - several layers of indentation are common now but were not when the limit was seen as reasonable.
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#34The article has the causality backwards. We don't use 80 characters because that's what the Hollerith card used, the Hollerith card used 80 characters because that's a good ergonomic width. (Or, if you prefer, the Hollerith card succeeded because it was a good ergonomic width.) Coincidentally (or perhaps ironically) the article itself is formatted for ~80 characters per line, not because it's bound by the Hollerith c…
I agree, and I was thinking the same thing as I read the article. Even so, I'm glad we're talking about history. 79 or 81 characters would be pretty much the same. You have to know the history to understand why 80 is a magic number.
And why does my terminal window have a baud rate? Why is it so slow?
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#35Out of curiosity, where did the 132 column standard (for wide carriage printers) come from (why 132, not 130 or 120)?
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#36I 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'…
> 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. Considering the numbers of programmers in the world, and how long they've been working with text, and how much annoyance text breaks / line wrapping / format flowing causes it's kind of surprising tha…
I guess these are enough general: put operator sign before line break; don't break inside of the most nested expression; don't break between variable type and name...
There are more such rules which differ between standards (like Linux kernel style vs. PHP PSR-2 style), e.g. how to pad trailing lines of function call. Linux style says to align trailing lines at offset next to the opening brace. (This doesn't look good in case of long function name, though, but most of time readability of this way is very good.) K&R is referenced as an original of such style, just as everywhere in Linux coding style. Also Linux coding style is not just what is told in Documentation/CodingStyle - there are some unwritten tools which you'll encounter when you run scripts/checkpatch.pl or get reviews on your patch submission.
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Plus, this only gets worse as you get older and your eyesight starts to diminish.
Yup, I'm at that point.
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think we read code the same way we read normal text. If you have this in your code:
qry.setParameter("a", a);
qry.setParameter("b", b);
qry.setParameter("foo", foo);
qry.setParameter("bar", bar);
Or if you have something like this:
Query qry = getEntityManager().createNamedQuery("User.findUserBySomething", Long.class);
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#39Apologies for being somewhat off topic, but does anyone know where I can go these days to get some cards punched (for a small museum display)? Given how common punchcards were, it has been difficult to find someone. Anyone out there have access to an old IBM 026, 029, 129?
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#40I've switched all my settings (terminal, console, emacs) to 120 characters.