Christopher Barker wrote:
(And did they ever stop to wonder why those old terminals
standardized on 80 columns?)
Probably because IBM decided on 80 columns for their punched cards.
And that probably didn't have anything to do with a readable width
for text. Nobody used computers for word processing back then.
In fact punched cards predate computers altogether, originally
being developed for electromechanical accounting and record keeping
machines.
I’m
pretty sure the old tractor feed paper terminal I first learned to code
on was a lot more than 80 char wide.
Line printers were traditionally 120 chars wide, but again that had
nothing to do with text. It was so that accountants could print reports
with a ridiculously large number of columns of figures.
How many of us still type on QWERTY keyboards? Even on a phone, like I
am now.
Once you're used to qwerty, anything else is a nuisance, even if you're
not touch typing on it. A place I park at recently installed machines
you enter your car's license number into. The keyboard has the letters
in alphabetical order, presumably because someone thought it would be
"easier". But nowadays I suspect it just makes it harder for most
people!
“Typesetters hundreds of years ago used less than 80 chars per line, so
that’s what we should do for Python code now” is a pretty weak argument.
But that's not the entire argument -- the point it is that typesetters
had the goal of making lines of text readable, which is similar (if not
quite the same) as the goal of making lines of program code readable.
It's a lot closer than, for example, the goal of fitting in an
accountant's spreadsheet.
Agreed — you can have too much complexity in 80 char. Which is why I
think the 80 char limit is about what fits on a screen, not complexity.
I would say it the other way around. Once you've reduced the complexity
of a line to something a human can handle, *most* of the time 80 chars
is enough.
There will be exceptions, but as long as the exceptions are rare, making
your editing window any wider will mostly just waste screen space.
--
Greg
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