Hacker News Reader

Comment by nixpulvis | Hacker News Reader

Didn't people in the news-printing business eons ago do studies on large lines and readability? Why else are there multiple columns in so many papers? Does anyone have a good reference for this? Personally, it makes sense to me, since I start to get lost reading long lines.

Plus the whole modern hardware comment is not well founded, since I like to put some monitors in vertical orientation.

View on HN

But remember that it's a huge difference between reading compact text in a newspaper or book compared to reading source code. I don't remember get lost reading long lines in source code ever but it happens regularly to me when reading books.

One of my favorite parts about reading on a computer is that I can highlight text with the cursor as I read it. Just dragging down a line at a time while reading means I virtually never lose my place while reading even very wide format text on a computer.

I do a similar thing when reading paper books using a digital system much older than computers.

I have no reference for this, but I understand that a significant limitation in the news print industry would be what the Linotype machines could produce. They literally produced a Line-Of-type, cast in lead. You couldn't practically manage slugs of lead that are much longer than the typical newspaper column width, and so they ended up the width they are.

And prior to Linotype, there would have been practical limitations to the forme size that could be easily managed and quickly re-set to fix typos.

So I don't think the newspaper column width was the result of centuries of experimentation into readability. It Just Happened. (Same as the gauge in railways)

While arguably shorter lines were easier to set and maintain by hand, both hand typesetting and Linotype machines could certainly produce lines of text longer than a typical newspaper column -- and they did: look at any book without columnar text produced during the same period!

I think you're right about it being a way to deal with a physical limitation, but not of the physical type -- rather, of the physical paper. If you divide the page vertically into two or three columns (for magazines) or six to nine (for broadsheets), you get an extremely flexible grid to use for fitting stories around one another and around photos and advertisements. Text could be a single column wide or two or even three columns across; headlines can run across just a column or two or across the whole page; you can always find somewhere to put that story that continues from page 1A.

"Plus the whole modern hardware comment is not well founded, since I like..." That is exactly the essence of Linus comment. If some people choose to do something that does not mean the rest needs to accommodate. 80 chars limit is just ridiculous in 2021.

I dont think its that cut and dry but i find 120 which got popular with githubs viewable columns to be pretty great.

Code is drastically different from prose, as code has a lot of repetition. For example:

  some_long_variable_name = 42
  new_value = description_function_name(some_long_variable_name)
  do_something_with(new_value)

All of the above has 5 unique tokens, several of them repeated. Unless you’re using lots of global variables, most of those tokens will be scoped entirely within that function, so you can also infer an awful lot of meaning just from the context.

They were concerned about the ease of editors and typesetters making revisions. You can reformat shorter lines with less effort. It also affords more opportunity to insert ads.

I don't think you can extrapolate from prose, in which line breaks are meaningless, to code which is clearly very different.

https://mksm.dev/blog/2019-11-24__case-for-80-rule/ with some references

Reply on news.ycombinator.com