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The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

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Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#51

Post by rpedroso »

ChrisArgyle wrote: post #44
lisper wrote: post #14

The 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…

Also the author seems to have missed that this char limit is changing. In Python, for example, an official style guide update in 2013 [1] allows for 100 char line length. [1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#maximum-line-lengt...

To clarify, PEP 8 nonetheless recommends that lines be limited to 79 characters, and even recommends capping docstrings and comments to 72 characters. The python standard library follows those guidelines.

The 100-character allowance is for code "maintained exclusively or primarily by a team that can reach agreement on this issue".

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#52

Post by jahewson »

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.

> it's an accident which happens to line up quite well with the human eyes ability to track horizontal lines of text.

Citation needed.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#54

Post by lisper »

kazinator wrote: post #42
lisper wrote: post #14

The 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…

"Ergonomic" in the same sentence as "Hollerith card" can only be tongue-in-cheek humor.

Not at all. The H-card dates back to 1890, and punched cards in general go back a lot earlier than that. Given the technological limits of the day, the H-card is actually quite a good design.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#55

Post by ChuckMcM »

lisper wrote: post #14

The 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…

Exactly, for readability a printout should be 10 characters per inch, which on 8.5 x 11 paper means 80 characters max with .25" margins on either side. It would perhaps be better argued as the tyranny of 10 point type :-)

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#56

Post by ddebernardy »

derekp7 wrote: post #35

Out of curiosity, where did the 132 column standard (for wide carriage printers) come from (why 132, not 130 or 120)?

Likely because of the VT100:

http://vt100.net/docs/tp83/chapter5.html

> 132 column × 14 lines (VT100, VT101, VT125) display

> Allows you a larger format for detailed or spread sheet work so you can preview reports prior to printing. (Note: The advanced video option, which is standard with the VT102 and VT131, provides 132 column × 24 lines display.)

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#57

Post by Bartweiss »

lisper wrote: post #14

The 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 think this might be a case of two-way causation, though.

~80 characters is a good, readable target, but that's not what we have. For a long time, we've had a militant standardization on So the question remains: why 80? 80-ish, sure, but why such a fixed standard? I don't know enough history to say if that's down to Hollerith cards, or the consequences of auto-formatters, or something else, but there's a more definite question than "what's a good width" here.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#59

Post by marssaxman »

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.

Yes, widescreen monitors are great - now I can view three editors side by side at standard line length!

I used to work at a dysfunctional startup which could not agree on any sort of coding style conventions, and one of the other devs would just zoom his Visual Studio window fullscreen and type, type, type until he bounced off the far edge, no sense of column width at all. His code was excruciatingly terrible for a lot of reasons, but at least it was easy to spot since it looked just as messy as its structure.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#60

Post by zyxley »

DanBC wrote: post #8
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'…

> 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…

gofmt comes to mind here. It renders the particulars of what you do while writing a non-issue by taking any valid Go input and producing a "canonical" final formatted version.
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