Fear Of Wide Monitors

[KLPounds]

Its an optimizing cash cow for those who get paid per line of code.:thumbsup:

[patbob]

The resolution of monitors has dropped in recent years -- there was a huge backward reset when HD TVs came out and all the manufacturers retooled for producing flat panel TVs.

We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.

[vtokar]

There exists an optimum ratio between the linewidth and the interline spacing. I do not know its exact value but it is defined by the ease of following with the eyes the line and then switching to the next one. This is why the newspapers are printed in narrow columns instead of across the page.

[snorkie]

Several people have mentioned the newspaper example. Its interesting, but code isn't a newspaper article. Rarely do I have several long lines in a row that require wrapping. Most code I see has tons of white space around lines of code for formatting/readability. Hogan

[RASPeter]

At my company our coding standard strongly discourages formatting code that way. We frequently deal with XAML and Win32, so that means we sometimes have really long lines, but that's just how it goes. It's really rare that anyone needs to actually see the entire line at once. Normally there are just a few items that actually matter, so we try to put those near the beginning of the line when possible (things like Name and Grid.Row/Column in XAML, for example). Generally, we find it much more useful to be able to get a sense of the structure of the code at a glance, and that gets broken when function calls are split into multiple lines. There are some rare cases where it makes sense to do that, of course, but that's stuff like building an xml file using stringstream.

[rtpHarry]

I guess the new limit is that it can fit on a GitHub page :)

[Lost User]

I gave up Visual Studio this year for vi. 80 column lines means I can get six terminal windows open on my 30" monitor and never need to scroll horizontally

[jschell]

MKJCP wrote:

I believe the point was if you can comprehend many characters per line in other media, why not in code

As in the written word? One difference is that a spelling error or a syntax error is unlikely to make a sentence unreadable. And certainly will not make the book self destruct. That of course isn't true for code. That difference would seem like a substantial one.

MKJCP wrote:

Paperback was a bad example but much written text has 100+ characters per line

Examples please. Fiction books do not. Non-fiction including text books do not. Magazines do not.

[jschell]

snorkie wrote:

Most developers I work with can't seem to code with word-wrap turned on. It seems as simple as reading a book.

Not sure I follow that. Creating code is not the same as reading code. In terms of literature wrapping (of any sort) is often based on word breaks and that works for text. But even in text that isn't true. For example if one has a bulleted section then letting the last bullet flow onto the next page, thus hanging out all by itself, is something that editors seldom do. And code has more reasonable ways it which one can wrap than just breaks between tokens. For example which of the following is more reasonable.

    Something var = ({long expression) 
                   + (1+2)
    Something var = ({long expression) + (1+2
                    )

[MKJCP]

You're right. It sure seemed like 100+. More like 90 based on the text books I just looked at.