On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 8:34 PM, Ric Werme <ewe...@comcast.net> wrote: > ... I find myself sticking to emacs and its "fill paragraph" > function and 80 column lines. It's amazing how much influence IBM cards > still have on me and other right-thinking individuals.
I was thinking the other day about that. I was wondering if/when the community-at-large reach a point where something wider than 80 columns becomes the standard. And if so, what will it be, or what will define it? Best I could come up with was "if Microsoft decides to change the default width of their 'console windows', that will be the new standard". Hey, it's about the same logic as an 80 column punched card. Why would the width change? With 16:10 displays becoming the norm, there's a lot of horizontal real estate going to waste. You can rotate to 10:16, of course. That's not without issues, though. It's non-standard. Many won't even know it's possible; others won't bother; others will try but won't want to deal with compatibility headaches from crap GUI software that assumes 16:10. And even at 10:16, with a modern high-res, high-DPI display, there's still likely to be wasted horizontal space. Why does this matter? It's commonly claimed that human understanding significantly increases when the information is fit in to the field-of-view at one time. That has been my experience, both personally, and with others. As one CS instructor put it (paraphrase), "Yes, this means you'll be a better programmer if you get a bigger monitor." So if "everyone" has a wide screen, but "nobody" uses it, there's actually reason to suspect that might be decreasing code quality. Perhaps one way to approach this would be for an IDE that can intelligently word-wrap code for display, keeping indent levels aligned, etc. "These are the kind of things I think about when I'm home alone and the power is out." (George Carlin) -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/