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The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

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Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#131

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

slantyyz wrote: post #49
kazinator wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A little offtopic and showing my age, but in 1985, personal computers were still a little expensive, and my high school couldn't afford an Apple ][ lab yet, but we did have a Digital PDP-(something) mini computer with a card reader (probably a donated relic). In my grade 10 "Data Processing" class (when was the last time you heard someone use the term Data Processing?), we had to use IBM cards with a Sharpie (the car…

> thankfully an optical reader vs a punch card reader

Hey, with punched cards you had: a) free confetti, b) gunfire soundtrack.

You were deprived and are in the Nile.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#133

Post by zeveb »

sixothree wrote: post #104
alayne wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing a general push for longer lines. I no longer religiously hold Java code at 80 personally.

I use the rule "if it fits on my screen then it's not too long". And if your code doesn't fit on my screen, I might break the line and commit.

I use a portrait-mode monitor for coding, with 128 columns. Honestly, 80 is Just Fine by me. It is a nice readable width, and I don't mind wasting ~⅓ of my screen.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#134

Post by kiruwa »

kazinator wrote: post #129
kiruwa wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, within the context of this generation of string-handling functions, the particular example of strpbrk makes sense. But there's a reason that this sort of name has been left behind in modern APIs.

Yes; that reason being that we don't have the same strict limits on number of characters in an external name, and we simply have too many API's to remember to be able to give six character mnemonics to them. Short names are not left behind in core languages. For instance, a function that gives the length of a list, string or other sequence is often called length or len, and not length_of_sequence or whatever. Arc, in…

> For the basic core of a language, shortening names is good.

You do have to admit the slight irony of the shortened string-handling function names in C, given this fact.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#135

Post by kazinator »

kiruwa wrote: post #134
kazinator wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes; that reason being that we don't have the same strict limits on number of characters in an external name, and we simply have too many API's to remember to be able to give six character mnemonics to them. Short names are not left behind in core languages. For instance, a function that gives the length of a list, string or other sequence is often called length or len, and not length_of_sequence or whatever. Arc, in…

> For the basic core of a language, shortening names is good. You do have to admit the slight irony of the shortened string-handling function names in C, given this fact.

You mean, the irony that the names are short, but mountains of code are dedicated to getting string handling in C, and still getting some of it wrong?

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#136

Post by ScottBurson »

stygiansonic wrote: post #3

While the first example of car sizes and Roman chariots is likely incorrect (as the article itself points out, and it's also suspiciously familiar to the debunked railroad gauge/Roman chariot story[0]), I'm always fascinated by stories like this. It underlies the organic nature by which many of our systems have grown. The same kind of "cruft" you see in systems and designs that have been around for a long time (Why i…

Since we're being pedantic: the phrase is "chock full". [0]

[0] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/chock

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#137

Post by Karunamon »

ptx wrote: post #98
Karunamon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python too, because you're forced to indent. One line of moderate length explanatory text out to console in the middle of an if: block, and you have to resort to silly tricks[1] to remain PEP8 compliant. [1]: https://tkware.info/2016/05/08/a-case-for-increasing-pep8-li...

If you weren't forced to indent when appropriate, and chose not to, I think that would damage readability even more. There are contexts when Python doesn't force you to, such as the example the article shows as "ways [that] actually make our code less obvious and less readable": err("HTTP 403 Forbidden -" " Does your bitbucket user have rights to the repo?\n") But if you indent it properly, I don't think it's less re…

The reason I complain about that err() example is because it relies on very un-pythonic behavior. You're one stray comma away from sending in a tuple rather than a silently concatenated string.

(Coincidentally, this is why the separator there is a dash, rather than the more grammatically correct comma)

And I thank you for the other examples of ways to handle the URL, but again we've moved into making changes for very minor benefit just to please the analyzer, rather than the human reading the code.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#138

Post by mavhc »

ptx wrote: post #99
mavhc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like lines should change width more often to make such silly bugs noticeable so they can be fixed.

What's the silly bug? How should it work if it were fixed?

> I have to resize my terminal window and my Emacs window.

Should be an option to auto resize or auto wrap

> When I then switch to working on other programs in the same windows, those programs then tend to be infected by wider-than-80-character lines unless I remember to resize things back to normal, which in turn perpetuates the problem.

Why would a program care about what size the window was when you ran it in the past?

> So either the applications would have to constantly resize themselves when I switch between files (which seems really annoying)

Isn't that exactly what a GUI is for?

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#139

Post by nickzoic »

slantyyz wrote: post #49
kazinator wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A little offtopic and showing my age, but in 1985, personal computers were still a little expensive, and my high school couldn't afford an Apple ][ lab yet, but we did have a Digital PDP-(something) mini computer with a card reader (probably a donated relic). In my grade 10 "Data Processing" class (when was the last time you heard someone use the term Data Processing?), we had to use IBM cards with a Sharpie (the car…

Yep, a pretty serious piece of kit, although you really needed a monochrome monitor for it to work properly ... regular TVs didn't have the horizontal bandwidth.

Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card

#140

Post by grkvlt »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #116

Punched cards were a pain to work with. We used to have a 40,000-card master file that we had to run through twice a day on a Univac 1001, at 1,000 cards/min. per feed, plus jams. The racket was deafening. When the card reader jammed, it destroyed the card. We had to retrieve the bits of card, and tediously re-create the card on an IBM 026 keypunch, one column at a time. One time a card got caught between two pinch r…

> except they had another word for the "F"

I believe you're allowed to say "Fuck" and it's various declensions on HN now!

I'm always particularly intrigued by people who write things like "Sh#t" or "F#ck" because it's unclear who they are censoring for, and indeed why. If it was simple prudishness, I assume they would either use some twee alternative or mis-spelling, but simply eliding one letter suggests they themselves have no problem with expletives. It certainly doesn't protect viewers from seeing the taboo word, as a string of punctuation like "#&$!" might, so that isn't the purpose. Wildly off-topic, so apologies...

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