The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
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The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
1–10 of 148 posts
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#250-75 characters is the optimal line width for the human eye to scan: http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#3While 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 is it the "Referer" header in HTTP? Why do we still call it Ajax/XHR when XML is rarely used?) is seen in many aspects of life.
Etymology is choke full of them. Consider the word, "consider" - its roots may have meant something like "consult the stars" at one point in time. (I think I first read about this in Sagan's Cosmos)
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#450-75 characters is the optimal line width for the human eye to scan: http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
I think the biggest problem with translating this into code widths is that we use indentation liberally. Seeing 6-12 characters taken up by whitespace is nowhere near uncommon.
So, given that, perhaps 80 characters isn't so tyrannical...
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#5I 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's the perfect width to fit two people side-by-side comfortably, with a bit of room in the middle.
Now we only need to think of things that have developed for historical purposes, yet are not reasonable defaults.
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#6Cars are pretty well sized for fitting two people side by side(and the appropriate controls).
80 columns is a pretty good length for lines of text.
I see no tyranny here.
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#7I've heard this reasoning (that 80 col terms are directly due to the 80 cols on a punched card), but never any proof.
Frankly, it sounds like numerology, to me.
"Hey! Both these numbers are 80, and they describe closely related dimensions. No way that's a coincidence! The newer one must have been specifically chosen to match the older one."
While it could of course be true, until I see reasonable proof, I'm going to assume that both values were the outcome of fitting a data representation (holes or characters) into a size that was effectively fixed for other reasons (standard card size, commonly available paper and CRT widths).
Especially since IBM later put out 96 column cards.
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#8I 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 that there isn't better ways of wrapping lines without line breaks.
What's current best practice? Or is it just down to the project style guide?
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#9I 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 used to seem natural to me, but as screens have gotten wider, it now seems like I usually have my terminals set wider when I have two set side-by-side. Even on my relatively small laptop screen.
I actually was just contemplating ditching the 80-char limit the other day, at least for personal projects.
Re: The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
#10[deleted]